Who is G and what did he do to my ADSL?

Published on 16 April 2008 in , ,

One of the reasons I quite like Plus.net as an ISP is that they’re pretty open and honest with you. For example, for those of us on a capped broadband package, they provide a simple online tool that tells you how much you’ve used in a month. Very simple but you’d be amazed at how many ISPs don’t do this.

Anyway, the bandwidth meter runs for each month long billing period – and my latest one started at the beginning of April. Unfortunately the bandwidth meter appears to be broken and isn’t showing my monthly usage. It’s not a big deal as normally I get nowhere near using up my 8Gb monthly quota, but none-the-less, I like to know what’s going on so I dropped them a support ticket.

Impressively within about twenty minutes they’d given me a call back to explain what was going on – it was all tied in to the fact that some months ago, the company had sent out an email inviting customers to essentially beta test their trial of the BT Retail Internet Network. Don’t ask me quite what it was all about, but as joining it was merely a case of adding a 2 to my ADSL username on my router, I did it and found I actually got a small performance increase on my broadband. Then, like many I guess, I promptly forgot about it – plus.net just left things running when the trial ended.

Everything was fine until April, when, for some reason, the trial network ceased being monitored for usage and lo, it wasn’t showing up online.

In one way it’s a shame I noticed, but I did and the friendly bloke on the phone asked me to change the settings, to move me back onto the normal DSL network. Problem presumably solved and quite possibly half a months broadband usage un-metered.

Anyway, the whole reason I began this post was the support email I got soon after I submitted the original request.

Passing to G.

Goodness knows who or what G. is though. Although actually looking at that support comment now, having gone from writing a “support request comment of the day” post to a “changing DSL networks” post, perhaps you really had to be there…