Its been a bad week for email related gaffes; first PlusNet, and now Orange, who have come under fire from a number of ex-customers who found that once their old Freeserve and Wanadoo email accounts had been deleted without any warning. In the past, customers who left would be able to enjoy a 90-day cooling off period in which they would still have enough time to access their account, back up old emails and notify their contacts of a change of address.

Over the last week, Orange have begun to shut off email accounts belonging to former Orange subscribers without warning – no more cooling off period.

From a business point of view, it seems entirely fair for Orange not to provide what would essentially be a free service to a non-paying customer, but what seems to have got everyone’s hackles up is the conduct – no warning or notice had been given of this change in policy.

Ultimately, this devalues the offer of free email from service providers – customers can avoid having to change email addresses and contact info when they switch by simply signing up for email accounts elsewhere – hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! all provide free access to email.

Last year PlusNet were dogged by repeated criticisms of their email service; customers lost important emails forever after inboxes were clogged up with spam and viruses – now the Sheffield-based ISP said that it had accidentally deleted roughly 10 per cent of a backlog of customer email during a routine upgrade of new anti-spam software.

A rather lamely worded statement reads: “These mails will not be recoverable and we recommend customers who have not received email that was sent yesterday to ask the sender to re-send where possible.”

This is something of a worst-case scenario in terms of internal cock ups for PlusNet, which had hoped to win back customers who had left the year previous precisely because of mismanaged email accounts. PlusNet’s reputation has also recently been mudded by murmurs of disaffection from former boss Lee Strafford, who will be taking BT, who bought PlusNet this year, to court as a result of his dismissal from the company after the takeover.

Sky is preparing to lunch – sorry, launch – a standalone broadband service that is currently called ‘Picnic Broadband’.

Picnic from Sky does not require users to sign up for any of the other Sky services (TV, call plans) and will see the media company directly compete in the ISP market for the first time.

This is good news for customers who have looked at ‘See Speak Surf’ and have felt that maybe they don’t want or need the See or the Speak side of Sky – Picnic should give customers the flexibility to pick and choose what they want from Sky. It is also rumoured that Sky will be planning to bundle some new wireless kit with their Picnic basket, allowing for greater competition between market leaders BT with their vanilla and goth Home Hubs and Orange with the Livebox.

As of yet, there has bee no official word from Sky on when this service is to be released, but they did have this to say:

“Sky is the UK’s fastest growing broadband provider and we’re always looking at ways to bring quality and value to even more customers. However, no plans are confirmed at this time.”

Sky has invested heavily in the LLU program, having installed equipment in more BT exchanges than any other ISP in the UK so far, meaning that when this service is launched, it should be able to reach the maximum amount of customers. Be Broadband have been unbundling with a similar frequency, but not quite on the same scale as Sky.

UK Mobile network operators 3 are getting ready to launch a new broadband service which will allow laptop users to have portable access for as little as £10 a month.

Launching in September, the as of yet unnamed service will allow users to access the net at download speeds of 2.8Mbps by simply plugging a USB stick into their laptop and connecting to the net wirelessly.

Anyone can sign up for this service, you don’t have to be a 3 mobile customer, although if you are, you will be able to qualify for a discount off the total cost of the USB stick, the price of which normally is mooted to be £99. There will be a choice of Lite (1GB), Plus (3GB) or Max (7GB) for £10, £15 or £25 per month, with 10p per megabyte should you need additional monthly space.

3 says that this broadband will be free up users from a landline at home, as it will be able to be used anywhere in the home and on the move. However, much like the much-griped about LLU postcode lottery, the service will only be available in selected areas to begin with, with a gradual nationwide rollout to follow; to begin with, 3’s mobile broadband will only cover London within the North Circular, Birmingham and areas to the north, and areas in Scotland and Ireland. 3 hope to provide this service to at least 85 per cent of the UK by December this year.

This is bad news for rival mobile networks Orange , Virgin and O2/Be, who have their own broadband interests to worry about. More on this as and when we hear it.

Virgin Media big cheese Steve Burch has grabbed himself a £3.6m parachute and leapt off of the Hindenberg, citing “family and personal reasons” for his unprecedented departure.

Exec types will have noted that ‘family and personal reasons’ is boardroom slang for ’shareholder displeasure with an underperforming investment’, although it is rumoured that his wife is unwell.

Mr Burch, is in line to get a lump sum of around £750,000 along with shares worth more than £2.8 million as a goodbye handshake.

Virgin Media was a venture that promised to change the face of British TV and Broadband forever – the media group has met with stiff resistance from market leaders, particularly Sky. Recently Virgin have attempted to find buyers for the group, but have recently put the brakes on any potential sale due to recent convulsions in the worldwide markets.

Virgin Media chairman Jim Mooney released a statement saying: “Steve has contributed significantly to the transformation of Virgin Media. Since he joined us, the company has emerged as the UK’s only ‘quad-play’ provider.”

Computer retail outlet PC World have had to put the kibosh on their free laptop deal with Orange, after enthusiastic punters exhausted their supply of laptops in under a month.

PC World apparently had “tens of thousands” of laptops to be given away as part of the deal, and now they’re all gone. Like TalkTalk and RedTen Internet before them, the two companies seemingly failed to anticipate the level of customer demand.

When the deal was still ongoing, customers who signed up to the 2Mbps Orange Starter Broadband service in PC World stores were able to either take the laptop, a not-too-shabby Advent 7211 with a 40GB hard drive, or trade off its store value of £350 for any other laptop sold in the shop.

The deal ended with next to no fanfare at all. A scant blurb at the PC World website read thus: “We’re Sorry. This deal has now ended. You can still take advantage of our great laptop deals at PC World…”

Just thought I would write a quick post about my new Virgin Media 20MB broadband connection that I had installed the other day. I was a bit dubious at first about what speed I would achieve once it was installed as the media is currently full of scare mongering over the actual speed verses the advertised rates. Although in my opinion it is clearly stated in most cases that the speed will be ‘up to’, in any case if you are using ADSL you can see what speed you are likely to achieve using our broadband line check tool, unfortunately we can’t provide the same estimate for cable packages.

Sorry, back to the Virgin Media connection, I have to say it is fantastic! I am constantly achieving broadband speeds of between 18-20MB which is much better than I expected and the connection has worked flawlessly since it was installed. With my new connection working from home on the Internet is actually easier and quicker than being in the office.

I did have to get an engineer to come out and install me a new modem, I was previously connecting through my Virgin Media TV Box and apparently that would not be able to handle the 20MB connection. But the engineer came and went without any fuss and checked everything was working before he left. My only hope is that Virgin do not implement any traffic shaping on me as I have been downloading quite a lot since the new connection was installed, seeing as the price of the Virgin Media XL Broadband Package is quite high I hope they don’t otherwise they may soon lose me as a customer.

All in all I have to recommend the Virgin Media 20MB broadband connection as it is the fastest I have experienced and hasn’t had any problems so far (fingers crossed).

Virgin Media, having seen more TV customers migrate to Sky, have been focussing on what many see as the ace up their sleeve – the fact that they are the sole provider of Cable broadband services in the UK.

Broadband delivered via fibre-optic cable does not suffer from the ‘postcode lottery’ of ADSL, and with the current technology in place, is theoretically capable of achieving speeds of up to 50Mbps, more than twice the speed offered by ADSL 2+.

A series of posters that were being put up around the capital this weekend says as much, the headline sees Virgin Media telling customers ‘the truth about £10 Broadband’ and goes on to list the reasons why Cable > ADSL, conveniently ignoring and potentially annoying the 300,000 punters who have signed up to Virgin’s ADSL packages.

Fibre is certainly the way forwards, due to its versatility as a medium – TV, Broadband and voice all across the same wire – and due to the faster speeds available. BT are reportedly drawing up plans to invest in unrolling fibre networks in the near future.

The football season kicked off this weekend, with Aston Villa up against Liverpool, Arsenal facing Fulham, Sky squaring up to Virgin Media and BT facing a new challenge from TalkTalk.

Ad campaigns launched last week leading up to Saturday were all based around Premiership coverage with Virgin and BT making the most of their partnership with Setanta, who also launched a TV campaign this weekend starring Des Lynam.

A Virgin poster campaign cheekily chants; ‘We love Setanta, we do… And Sky Sports we love you,’ whilst BT’s TV ad continues the Kris Marshall ‘domestic silence’ saga, in which a confused stepson watches a near-live match with his second dad.

Not to be outdone, having moved into Tiscali’s former position in the UK Broadband Premiership, TalkTalk unleashed a new player in their squad; new customers who sign up for an 18 month free Broadband contract with TalkTalk get a Freeview box bundled with the deal as well as two months of Setanta Sports action free.

It looks like PlusNet are set to be hauled over the coals concerning words whispered by current members of staff about former colleague and boss Lee Strafford, who was sacked in March after being accused to planning to set up a rival business, has claimed that the Sheffield based ISP had intended to sell out to a bigger firm such as BT, and that a plan for a takeover was in place; he was to leave amicably once the deal had been completed.

In an email exclusively acquired by the Register, Strafford states that the split was anything but amicable:

“I did not foresee that the senior management team would once again forsake doing things the right way for their individual weakness, ego, greed and personal ambition - more fool me eh […] Lets see if they are happy to tell their lies not just in dislosures but in a tribunal hearing and ultimalty in a high court.”

PlusNet was founded back in 1997, and provided an ISP service under the Force 9 brand. PlusNet grew from a small local outfit into a recognised national brand, always with a consumer-centric ethos at the core – Strafford was boss from 2000 right up until his dismissal; his email claims that this ethos, “the PlusNet methodology” has been “undermined”.

As of yet, there is no fixed date for a court hearing, and neither BT or PlusNet have come forwards to comment.