Paypal problems

21st June 2010 Paypal problems appear to have settled down.

Reports of failures have now nearly stopped and any that do occur seem to be more concerned with the somewhat confusing manner in which Paypal conduct their operation. It is important to follow the instructions. If you have a Paypal account they would prefer you to use that service, if you are happy to do so the process will usually be a lot smoother.

Please note that the manner in which Paypal operate is out of our control, they supply a third party service to process payments on our behalf.

3rd November 2009 Paypal problems continue. Despite our wishes to help our customers part with their money in return for our wireless internet service the Paypal service still intermittently fails. Some customers have no problems, however for unknown reasons some payments just do not go through the Paypal system. If that occurs then use the contact form on the welcome page to email us so that we are able to manually enter the details and send you a paypal request

1st September 2009 Despite our best efforts the Paypal payment system still plagues us with problems. Until such time as it is fully operational our advice is to use the contact form on the welcome page to email us so we may manually add time or create a new user account on your behalf.

10th August 2009 Although the original Paypal payment system problem which has affected us since July has been fixed, our detailed analysis of all Paypal transaction logs since then is still showing some payment confirmation timeouts from Paypal. Our belief is that this is most likely caused by a problem with our accounts server and it's internet connection. We therefore decided last week to build a new much faster server and to move it to our Data Centre where it will be connected to a dedicated 100MB/s line. If further testing this week continues to prove successful, we will switch over to the new server later this week.

30th July 2009 We have resolved all of the Paypal problems except one. We have discovered that Paypal have recently made changes to their internal security checks that are made on the Credit card details entered when making a payment. Occasionally we have found that certain cards will fail. On some occasions we have found a payment works and is successful, yet when the customer tries again a few hours or days later, it fails with the error "The card you entered cannot be used for this payment. Please enter a different credit or debit card number." We are unable to resolve these problems directly as it Paypal which is choosing to reject a particular card or not. We are in discussions with Paypal and will try to find a resolution as soon as possible.

27th July 2009 Grateful thanks to those customers who have provided feedback recently on the problem with returning to the hotspot login page after making a payment. As a result of the information that has been provided, we have been able to identify further changes that were made by PayPal without our knowledge. The return page now functions again however further testing will be carried out during the coming week to ensure this has been resolved.

18th July 2009 Tests have concluded that Paypal have added some advertising cookies to their main login page from Omniture. Unless their cookies are allowed through, Paypal login fails! We have made changes to the hotspot to allow for this change within Paypal. We can only apologise to all our customers but this change was outside of our control as we were not notified by Paypal of this significant change to their website functionality. It is quite possible that Paypal has made further changes that we are currently unaware of, therefore further testing will be carried out over the weekend.