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[kitz]

Issues with the Shared MSILs.

It has been obvious that since January 2015 during peak times some of the Shared WBMC MSILs have been experiencing difficulties and some customers with 80Mbps were seeing peak time congestion down to just 12.5Mbps. Plusnet always maintained that they had sufficient bandwidth of their host links meaning that once the SVLAN had been ruled out then it is most likely to be congestion at the MSILs.
I been saying since March 2015 that the shared MSILs owned by BT wholesale were the most likely point of congestion.   

The ticket which I have had open since July 2015 where they finally admitted,

I can confirm that we are managing to replicate the issue on this side, work to eliminate the cause of this issue is ongoing and we hope to have further information shortly.

It was later confirmed that my account was one of those where the issue could be reliably replicated and the MSILs were the likely issue.   
The ticket has remained open since then with a few updates .  In Dec I got

[INTERNAL]
Further work being completed - Problem 89196.
This Question is now on hold until Monday 11th January at 7:00am.

Yesterday my ticket was closed

Thank you for your continued patience and apologies in the delay in getting back to you.

I have spoken further with our backend team and they have informed me that the majority of the problems we were seeing during peak times have now been resolved. There are further investigations ongoing for isolated cases with our suppliers but overall you should have seen an improvement. If you continue to see peak time slowdowns then please do let us know and we shall complete further investigation for you.

Edited to correct typo:  July 2016 >  July 2015

[kitz]

It was all times of the day. The plusnet line profile page showed it as being 14.9Mb before which I pointed out to Plusnet support as they said they could not find any issues with their standard tests. After the change  today the line profile page is now showing 40Mb. Pings a bit better now too. Happy days! 

I wondered if that could be the case.   
I would therefore suspect that the 15Mb was unrelated to the impending move, and Plusnet should really have been able to reset that for you there and then, but perhaps didnt like to mess with anything their side as they will have been able to see that you were due to go over to the new network. 

As it turned out it looks like migration to the new platform has automatically done this for you.

[WWWombat]

It was all times of the day. The plusnet line profile page showed it as being 14.9Mb before which I pointed out to Plusnet support as they said they could not find any issues with their standard tests. After the change  today the line profile page is now showing 40Mb. Pings a bit better now too. Happy days! 

I wondered if that could be the case.   
I would therefore suspect that the 15Mb was unrelated to the impending move, and Plusnet should really have been able to reset that for you there and then, but perhaps didnt like to mess with anything their side as they will have been able to see that you were due to go over to the new network. 

As it turned out it looks like migration to the new platform has automatically done this for you.

I wondered if the migration to the new system has triggered a false IP-profile-delta report in PN's backend - which resulted in the wrong IP profile being set. This certainly happened in the middle of migrations from ADSL to FTTC. Perhaps some default (even held within BT Wholesale) has been passed through.

We're now watching our account very carefully ... but if someone could report how much advance warning could be gleaned by monitoring the "closed" tickets (ie how far before the migration does a ticket appear), it would help...

[WWWombat]

This isn't going as it should!
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled

I was struck by your .sig, jelv, in this pending morass.

I reckon, on this one, that Plusnet is proving that the Universe keeps sending those idiots, and the software engineers just can't keep up...

[Chrysalis]

kitz did you have to poke anyone higher up to get that kind of response to your tickets? mine were just closed with comments saying product is within spec.

obviously that was factored in to my decision to leave plusnet.

[kitz]

kitz did you have to poke anyone higher up to get that kind of response to your tickets? mine were just closed with comments saying product is within spec.

obviously that was factored in to my decision to leave plusnet.

No. 
I was as you know originally posting on the forums, but got peed off at certain people denying there was an issue & some of the garbage that was spouted... so I decided to open a ticket.   At first I got the generic tests and ensure you are using ethernet not wifi etc.   
I had a bit of firm but polite rant saying I've already told you this and I suggest you look at this thread on your forums.  It went quiet for a couple of days, then for some reason was picked up by a complaints advisor and I got a PM on their forums from one of whom I shall call the 'old school reps' who I now think is pretty high up on the networking side of things.    As I told you at the time, said person knows his stuff and told me that they had been monitoring my line and had been able to replicate the issue and basically confirmed that my theory re the MSILs could be correct.  I was told they were investigating and were not taking it lightly.   I did post something on the PN forums to this effect but there was that much ho-ha going on at the time it was probably lost.  Also the fact that Bob said it wasn't capacity at their end.  Im inclined to believe Bob as he doesnt, nor has he ever done the BS.  So I sat back and waited because I'd also got a pile of other things going on that was taking up all my time.

[jelv]

I've had a PM from Kitz confirming who it was at Plusnet - he has been there a long time, was heavily involved with the network configuration from way back and really knows his stuff. I had a testing session with him where I was disconnecting/connecting, he was looking at which MSIL I'd connected through and I'd run a TBB speed test looking for the slow x1 result. He was able to accurately predict before I ran each test whether it would be good or bad.

[Chrysalis]

Yeah I was told also before, but was just curious if said person had to push someone in tech support to treat it seriously.

For sure that idiot on the plusnet forums derailed that thread so much it made the message even harder to get across.

[jelv]

Kitz (or anyone else): is there anything in how the WBMC dedicated is configured or bandwidth purchased that would make sense of Plusnet offering 40/2 and not 40/10?

[burakkucat]

[off topic]
I wonder if the reason for Plusnet dropping the supply of the 40/10 product was planned because they may be soon supplying the 55/10 product?
[/off topic]

[ktz392837]

Is there an easy way of finding out if you are on the new network and which wbmc node you are on?  Thanks

[kitz]

Kitz (or anyone else): is there anything in how the WBMC dedicated is configured or bandwidth purchased that would make sense of Plusnet offering 40/2 and not 40/10?

Nope as per the old centrals and shared its bandwidth is symmetric.   
The savings of 40/2 was IMHO possibly something to do with reaping back the previous 80/20 they did even if the EU could only get 40/10.    Bit of a waste of money really that was and they were the only ISP that did this.  So I'd say it will have been purely down to the £3+VAT pm savings on the port component.   I dont know how many fttc users they do have but just say half are on fttc, and they manage to put half of those on 40/2 then that is a potential saving of 75k per month.

[off topic]
I wonder if the reason for Plusnet dropping the supply of the 40/10 product was planned because they may be soon supplying the 55/10 product?
[/off topic]

Don't know,  depends what the charging structure is for the product, not even sure if the SP's would be aware of its impending release back when they decided to drop to 40/2.

[kitz]

Is there an easy way of finding out if you are on the new network and which wbmc node you are on?  Thanks

atm by doing a tracert.
If you are on dedicated then you will see a hop with a private IP eg 172.17.xx
From the tracerts Ive seen, the interconnect routers arent configured to respond to ICMP ping so it doesnt give anything away about location.

The private IPs indicate Plusnets network, whether or not in time they allocate public IPs which could make the locations more visible (as BTretail/consumer do) I dont know. :/

[jelv]

I thought it was probably symmetric.

Isn't the difference between 40/2 and 40/10 only .50p?

40/20 was a bonkers idea in the first place!

[ejs]

From the WBC price spreadsheet, 40/2 is £13 and 40/10 is £14 per month, ex VAT of course. 80/20 is £16. 55/10 isn't listed in the WBC price list yet.

Perhaps 55/10 will be the new "Fibre Extra" offering, and 80/20 will be reserved for BT Infinity.