1. Chess (An Introduction)

2. Well Oh Hai!, I’m here to talk to you today about Chess.

3. Now you may or may not know about Chess and no, It has nothing at all to with little black and white pieces on a small board. Chess Broadband is one of the latest companies to throw enough customers at us to demand a portal of their own and is a tag on to the partner system.

4. Chess Lives currently on live but is not officially live yet, they have access but with the caveat that the web site is not fully ready yet. You can find the portal at - https://partner.chessbroadband.com/ It looks like this –

5. Currently Chess Broadband does have live users on it that were initially signed up on partner then migrated across but there are not yet any chess products of their own on live. New chess partner signup is done at the same URL as partner ones and is only differentiated by a small drop down box where you can pick either Chess or Plusnet for your partner. https://partner.plus.net/signup/

6. Generally however you would never sign up a new chess partner, or end user, or even a test account on chess. This is due to something chess will soon have called the Chess API. The Chess API is designed to give them a way of pulling down the data from every single chess partner at once (lists of users, invoices etc) and as such they have a 3 tier approach to their visp.

7. Where as you might think of metronet or partner with its 2 stage relationship, chess has this – Due to this you will never see any billing or invoices tab on any chess partner portal account. Chess Gods Partners End users

8. Wait hang on a min a you did I hear you say, Test NONE of the things?? Expect it to change but at the moment we do not have a chess ztest partner account. Once the development completes on the API we are planning to make it simply ignore the ztest partner for all its reports to get around this. Should you really need to view something on chess then you should use the chesstelecom account, for now it’s the easiest way

9. At the moment chess use partner products but will soon get their own set of packages that should look like this – Basic (works like partner connectivity only) Standard (works like BT Plusnet Business Broadband Option 1) Extra (works like BT Plusnet Business Broadband Option 3) Premium (works like partner Business so no usage limit) However as they have not yet been signed off by chess at the time of writing this they may change slightly.

10. One thing Chess does have that partner does not is the email manager. Don’t get too excited though, its essentially the same as the scope one if you have ever seen that.

11. I Hope you have enjoyed this brief journey into the new Chess partner and are not currently like this guy here –

12. So, any questions?