The card printing system has had a few tweaks to help.

A couple of recently introduced bugs have been fixed.

The fields for VCARD can now have a default, which is useful for making VCARD entries for all the same company for example.

The fixed text field type can now have a multiple line text value - this makes it a lot easier to include standard text on a card template without having to make multiple entries, one for each line.

We'll work on any new improvements we can think of... Feel free to make suggestions.

Our plastic card printing service now allows multiple copies of the same card.

The original design was very much around ID cards where each card would have a different set of name, photo, barcode, other fields, and be printed once.

However, many people have used for things like business cards, wifi password cards, and all sorts where multiple prints of the same card are needed. So we have now allowed a quantity against each card.

There are also a few more standard templates now.

We are making some changes to our Ip transit connectivity over the next few days. This should be pretty seamless as just mean traffic taking new routes. However, there is always a risk of issues.

Today we are doing a bit or preparation which means some minor routing changes for about 5% of our traffic, and which we also expect to have no impact.

We use two data centres in London, Equinix and (Telecity). Equinix have planned engineering works on their power feeds on the morning of 2nd August as follows:

Investigations into the power incident that occurred on Wednesday 20th July 2016 have concluded that the outage was caused by the malfunction of the protection module on the primary circuit breaker for the A power riser in Building 8/9 of Equinix's LD8 (Harbour Exchange) data centre. An identical protection module is installed on the B riser power supply. It is now essential that both circuit breakers are replaced. In order to carry out this work safely it is necessary to power down the affected circuits in accordance with the following schedule in the early hours of 2nd August 2016:

A Power riser:
Power down: 00:00
Reenergise: 01:00 or sooner once work is complete

B Power riser:
Power down: 02:00
Reenergise: 03:00 or sooner once work is complete

A number of customers were emailed that their 1st of month DD was cancelled.

This process was stopped as soon as we realised what was happening so not many people will be affected. You will receive normal DD collection notices in due course for your monthly bills or have collection within 3 working days as per exiting notice (so may be 3rd instead of 1st) as per DD rules.

Our DD management system is coded to be as cautious and customer focused as possible and a minor error meant it was not happy with the DDs for regular collections being in place before the invoice was issued. This has been corrected now.

Sorry for any confusion caused.

I have added some more features to card printing.

https://cards.aa.net.uk

It now included linear barcodes including code 39, code 128, EAN13, UPC, EAN8, EAN5 and ITF

We use IRC all the time here at AAISP, both internally between staff teams and in helping our customers. Many customers have their own IRC client setup on their computer whilst others pop in to the IRC channel by using the web-based version we provide via our website.

To help improve the experience for customers using our web-based irc client we have a new one to try:

https://webirc.aa.net.uk/

We will have Technical Support staff available between 10am and 3pm each Saturday. Customers will be able to contact us in all the usual ways: Phone, email, IRC etc.

Whilst the staff are in the technical support department they will be able to answer general sales and accounts queries too.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all at A&A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agYHiSXple0

Following the recent media attention to the 'cyberattack' and possible data theft from TalkTalk, we asked our account manager how this affects us and our customers. The response was: "The attack was on our consumer website and doesn't impact our partner accounts and customers."

The service we buy from TalkTalk is their wholesale/'partner' account services which is kept separate from TalkTalk's 'consumer' services as much as possible. At the moment in time AAISP are confident that the statement above means that our own data and our customer's data is unaffected by this recent attack.

TalkTalk's own statement can be found here: http://help2.talktalk.co.uk/oct22incident

We have extended our support hours, which are now 8am to 6pm, Mon-Fri, except (English) public holidays.

Previously we worked 9am to 5pm, and sales/accounts still do. However the support staff can usually address simple/urgent queries in those areas if necessary.

Occasionally we do have people ask why we only work office hours, and it is worth trying to explain this. Many ISPs do, indeed, have 24 hour telephone support, for example.

For most of our services, there are faults that come in two flavours. Either there is some big issue (a major outage), in which case we have staff, getting involved in fixing things whatever time it is, or an individual line fault for DSL. It is pretty rare to have individual faults for VoIP, SIMs, etc, but you can, of course, get line faults for DSL.

When it comes to individual DSL faults, there are a load of things people can do at home/office to eliminate equipment and test for themselves, and we offer various on-line tests via our control pages.[1] This can help resolve things. But the issues that don't just go away, and would require support staff to do something, are almost always something that needs a BT engineer to go out.

With very few exceptions, BT engineers are not going to be going our any quicker if we book them next working day at 9am. So having support staff take calls in the middle of the night would not usually be any help. We also have no intention of farming support out to call centres following scripts.

Obviously we're interested in feedback on how the new support hours work for customers.

We have received a few reports from a customers about a popup window claiming to be from us, and encouraging the user to fill in a survey...

One of our interconnects in Maidenhead has planned work scheduled for Wednesday 4th June. The interconnect will be taken out of service for around 4 hours. During this time will will routing traffic over our backup link.

What is at risk: Connectivity to services hosted in Maidenhead. (Hosted servers, web, email, VoIP, control page access, Ethernet customers in Maidenhead). General internet connectivity for ADSL, FTTC and Ethernet customers in London will not be affected.

What is the risk? The risk is that during this time access to some services will be affected. That said, we will have backup link in place which will minimise this risk.

Time this is happening: 10pm Wednesday 4th June through to 6am Thursday 5th June, with downtime estimated of 4 hours.