New ticketing platform

Today we launched a brand new ticketing platform within our systems. A ticketing platform allows us to track and manage our customer communications which allows Glide to deal with customer enquiries and support issues much faster. It will also keep all the housemates informed of issues which affect the whole house. It means streamlined customer service where support issues are dealt with by the appropriate team member as quickly as possible.

Where the issue is broadband related the system will send ticket updates by text message to ensure you get back online as soon as possible.

We will soon enable customers to view their tickets from their online portal at www.glide.uk.com. This will inevitably help landlords and agents to better manage any issues across their entire portfolio.

Glide customers are advised to quote their ticket number whenever they call us. Customers can create tickets by emailing us at glide@glide.uk.com or by calling us on 08448 111 555 where a Glide team member is waiting to help.

Greenest telephone calls in the UK

We're pleased to announce that all telephone calls made through Glide are now carbon neutral. The UK telecoms market has been slow to reduce its carbon footprint but here at Glide we felt that we should be leading the way - not following. There is currently no greener way of making calls in the UK.

We've drastically reduced our power consumption and reduced our carbon footprint by offsetting the power that we do use to carry calls across the network. Even in the current economic climate the green agenda is extremely important to our customers. Students and young professionals like to make sure that their lifestyles are as environmentally friendly as possible and a key objective of many of our business customers is trying to reduce their carbon footprint.

Carbon credits have been purchased from two projects - a Wind Power Project in India and the Sichuan Province Hydro Power Project in China. The wind project is similar to the Jamnagar Wind Power Project in India and involves the construction of a number of new wind turbines which helps to reduce India's reliance on fossil fuels for electricity generation by providing renewable energy. This project will provide reliable, renewable power to the electricity grid and will directly benefit nearby villages through the provision of local employment.

The Sichuan Province Hydro Power Project bundles four small run-of-river hydro power stations and displaces electricity that would otherwise have been generated by fossil-fuel power stations. The project brings benefits besides that of climate change mitigation, including job creation and helping to address the shortfall of electricity available on the regional grid, with benefits to local households and economic development of businesses as well as providing energy security to the general community.

Calling Glide for free

From time to time customers ask us whether they can call us for free. The answer to the question is yes you can. The easiest way to do this is to dial 150 from any Glide telephone line and you'll be put straight through to us without costing you a penny.

The other way to call us for free from anywhere in the world is over VoIP. All you have to do is dial sip:glide@glide.uk.com. We'll also have ENUM configured within the next few months which will allow any company PBX to call us for free.

And you can always call us on 08448 111 555 or drop us an email to glide@glide.uk.com

Upgrades to our broadband network

We're pleased to announce that we are performing some major upgrades to our broadband network over the next few months. We are purchasing additional capacity in line with our current budget and our projected growth in customer numbers. We are also implementing a traffic management system to identify and prioritise traffic on our network.

Like other ISPs we deliver our broadband service over a network shared amongst our customers. This means we have to manage our network to ensure we provide the best service to all of our customers. Our goal is to make sure that time-critical applications such as VoIP and online gaming are always prioritised whilst ensuring that bandwidth-hungry protocols like Peer-to-Peer and Usenet are not allowed to harm the performance of the network. It will also allow us to manage the network better when dealing with the normal peaks in traffic on a day by day basis.

The upgrades will enable us to continue to offer unlimited broadband packages whilst also preparing everything for our forthcoming launch of our ADSL2+ services with top speeds of up to 24Mbps.

These changes will allow us to continue to offer the best broadband service to all of of our customers on current packages as well as enable us to offer much faster speeds in the near future.

Welcome to the new Glide blog

Welcome to the new Glide bog. We'll be talking about everything related to Glide here including future developments and what we actually get up to.

You can view our website at www.glide.uk.com to find out more about the services we provide.