For those of you who haven't seen the story, Plusnet has had to shut its webmail interface indefinitely. The story is being carried in El Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/16/plusnet_webmail_shut/).
The story carries an interesting quote from Neil Armstong (not the Neil Armstrong, surely?), product development director at Plusnet, "Armstrong pointed to a legacy of underinvestment at the firm, which it copped to earlier this year on its BT-backed relaunch. He said: "That has changed now and it's worth knowing that this is a new vulnerability in a piece of third party software.""
Crisis Management...one crisis to the next.
Glad to be away from the incompetents. ;)
Indeed. It's some admission by the guy though...
(and I see Pipex are cutting support jobs, so I'm well pleased to be away from Nildram!)
Pipex has been getting worse and worse since I left them in 2003. Even then things weren't perfect.. long hold times, billing mistakes, etc. I think with the convergence of ISPs we will see support drop in the industry overall. Small/medium providers will likely offer better support but at a price premium over the big boys, much like they do now.
I agree, Adam. Pipex were my first ISP, way back when (I think it was at 28.8k!). I left them quite quickly due to their arrogance. Nothing had changed when I tried Nildram. I prefer to pay a premium for service in most areas of life, I know what I want and what I don't, and one thing I cannot stand is being treated as a number.
I think problems will arise for smaller providers when more of the ISPs get in to the triple/quad play game. At the moment there's only a few that can "do it all" and it's generally not available everywhere. I for one know it would be difficult to not be tempted to go for Phone/Mobile/Broadband/TV at say £40 instead of paying around £20 for each.
If someone offered me that, I would be struggling, since I currently pay about £92pm for that package. :)
But I'd have no problems resisting if it was Sky or Orange! ;)
As far as I'm aware only Virgin Media do such a deal at present. Perhaps O2 will offer up an alternative in September; the Be * LLU network seems to have a fairly good reach. Not that O2 is known for it's fantastic customer service. :P
Speaking of Be*, they recently added an activation date for my exchange, then removed it a week or two before the go live date. I don't appreciate them getting my hopes up then crushing them! :whip:
As things stand, I wouldn't consider any of the big players, at any price.
I am more than happy to pay a bit more for my BB than say Sky/Orange/TalkTalk etc.
I value my connection and I would not entrust it any of them.