Rant Plusnet have really gone to sh*t!

Been getting more and more annoyed with Plusnet's silly traffic throttling etc and now I've had it.
I think I'm gonna bin them and get all the people I referred to bin them too.

Just for a laugh, I'm gonna post my latest exchange of tickets with them in here for you all to read.

I see that the exchange serving my GF's flat has been unbundled by TalkTalk/CPW as well as now Sky/Easynet.
After a friend's recent success with Sky's service I may try them out too.

As soon as I find a copy of their FUP and see if moderate-heavy downloading is gonna be a problem...

Anyone suggest another ISP if I don't go the LLU route?

 

Definately ditch those guys - there's no sensible reason to use limited BB anymore when you use it for more than page-browsing etc.

 

I like cable. They may cap you, but only to 5mb

 

UKOnline don't cap (or block P2P etc), and neither do BE (if you can get them).

I've just signed up to UKOnline and I had a few initial problems, but their customer support is EXCELLENT (they pick up the phone within 20 seconds, its a freephone number and they know what they're talking about).

 

I LOVED UkOnline before they got bought by murdoch/Sky. I have heard the service is still good but I would never give that guy money on principal (and I don't even have many). Be Unlimited is suiting me fine, there not packet shaping any traffic yet to my knowledge and I'm getting very good speeds.

 

They cap you to 5 Mb? The fastest internet I can get over here is 6 Mb!!!! Another reason to move.

 

well, you pay for 20Mb and you'll get capped to 5Mb for 4 hours at a time during 6pm and midnight

 

That kind of capping I can handle but I'm currently capped to 128kbps on ALL PROTOCOLS.
So even normal surfing feels like 56k on a good day.
Not what I pay (or should I say, my girlfriend pays) £240 per year for!

 

I pay 29quid a month, so that works out to 350~ but it's between two people., I get 20Mb standard bandwidth. Which does work.

 

£18 a month for Be unlimited, best service i've had in my time at uni, tickets get some form of response within a few hours (with you getting a text to that effect) and a proper answer within 24.

Up to 24meg broadband too, and installation is £24 as well.

 

Is this with Plusnet?
Is that a 20mb connection or 20GB transfer allowance?

I grudge paying £29 per month for an up to 8mb connection with 20GB transfer.
Especially since downloads are throttled at peak times (bit of a PITA when you wanna patch a game to play it and you get 15kbps on your download).

I can go to UKOnline and get a 16mb line, with unlimited transfer (as long as I don't take the piss) for only £25 per month.
Not only that, they answered the phone in about 3 rings on a free-phone number.
I'm still waiting for replies from Plusnet 9 hours later.

I used to love Plusnet's service (as my referral discount will attest to) but I feel they really are going downhill rapidly.
My referrals won't be going their way from now on tbh.

 

That's for 20mb connection with Virgin Cable, and no limits other then the "temporary" caps which don't really hurt me much, mos of my downloading is offpeak anyway (when I'm out of the house doing other stuff)

 

Hi archie,

Sorry to hear you're having problems. If you can provide me with the ticket ID to the above exchange with our support team then I'd be happy to have a chat to those involved as some of the responses aren't entirely accurate.

I think there's been a bit of confusion here about how the product you have signed up for works. I'm assuming you're on our BBYW PRO product? If so then you get 10GB between 8:00am and Midnight. All your traffic is prioritised and nothing is throttled or slowed down during this time. Between Midnight and 8:00am your usage is not counted towards your allowance and you are free to download what you want (again at high priority). It is possible to adapt your package to include extra GBs of usage. You can increase your monthly allowance in 2GB increments by paying an extra £1.50/mnth/2GB.

Here's where the confusion stems I think. When you reach your included monthly allowance, one of two things happens. You can choose for your account to be either fixed or flexible. This is a user configurable option that can be found in the Member Centre and can be changed to suit your needs. If your account is fixed then when your limit is reached, high priority traffic like web browsing/VoIP etc is rate limited to 128kbps and the lower priority stuff like binary Usenet and P2P is blocked. If your account is flexible however, no restrictions are applied and you are simply charged an extra £1.80/2GB for any additional usage you use. There's more information about this here.

So there are a number of things you could do...

• If you expect you'll be using more than your allowance on a frequent basis then upgrade your account to include more peak-time bandwidth. This will add £1.50 to your base subscription per 2GB that's added.
• Log into the Member Centre and change to the flex option. You will then pay for the extra bandwith when you exceed your allowance and no restrictions will be applied. (This is done in 2GB increments and costs a little more than if you pay for it up front - £1.80/2GB).
• Move to BBYW Option 3 at the same price that includes 20GB peak-time usage allowance. The difference being that rate limits would be applied to your traffic at certain times of the day whereas they aren't now (Usenet would be lower priority too).
• Revert back to your previous account - I get the impression that you upgraded to BBYW PRO from an older account type? We could always move you back to this if you'd rather?

Let me know if you've any questions about this or there's anything else I can do to help as I'd be sorry to see you go

Kind Rgds,

 

I left plusnet when all this throttling stuff was introduced.

Went to NTL (now Virgin Media) and havn't looked back since. I only have a 4mb connection but that's fine to share with my housemate.

 

Well I get around 333kbps permanent, it is all my line can handle and since BT is the only one to give it to me thats all I can get. So your talking £25pm for that crappy broadband. I think thats bad but at my mums house we have plusnet and they do restrict something serious in the evening but other times it is pretty good broadband.

 

Hi Bob,

I understood about the account being fixed or flexible but I didn't want flexible as my girlfriend pays for it and I wanted her to have a fixed amount for each month.
My main gripe is now the peak-time hours have been extended to 8am-midnight.
Now if I just wanted to do my usenet downloads that's be fine, I'd schedule sabnzbd to do them in those hours.
However, I am a bit of a PC nerd (hence being a member of these forums ) and often fix PCs for people etc.
If I do a re-install of a PC for someone and need to download OS updates etc, do I really want to wait til after midnight to start working on the PC?
Of course not.

Also, the restriction to 128kbps is shocking.
Maybe restriction to 512kbps I could live with but 128???
I might as well use dial-up if that's the case.

What I feel would be fairer for users over their monthly limit is restrict HTTP etc to 512kbps and block P2P/usenet etc during peak times (which should have stayed at 4pm-midnight IMO) and then allow unrestricted access to everything outwith those peak hours either at full speed or at the restricted speed.

Basically, there's no way I'm willing to pay (or let my GF pay) for 128kbps internet access at any time.

So I am going to switch to UKOnline's LLU service, which will give me an up to 16mb connection with no worries over this peak time rubbish that is unlimited.
And I realise its not truly unlimited, but it is as long as I don't take the piss.
So if I need to do downloads in the peak times to get a game patch in order to play, or fix a laptop etc, I don't have to be watching the clock and counting the bits. I can just get on with it.

My only concern is if my pings in games will suffer with P2P users during times I want to play but if they are really bad, I can always switch back to plusnet if I feel the need.

I am still awaiting my MAC code I think, so in the mean time I would be willing to hear what package you would suggest that would suit my needs.

 

Hi again,

What account type were you on (The 4:00pm-Midnight one) and what were your reasons for changing? I don't see why you can't achieve what you're wanting to do on BBYW Option 3 or perhaps the package you were on?

Not sure about usage on UK Online as their FUP is pretty vague at best. Which UK Online package are you going for? I notice you'd be tied into an annual contract so if you do decide to move then make sure you do your background research! I'm assuming that UKOnline uses Sky's infrastructure as I believe they were originally an Easynet reseller.

What speeds do you currently get on IPStream Max?

Also, have you got that ticket ID as I'd still like to have a chat with some of the agents who answered your original support query?

Rgds,

 

Hi again, just home from uni now.
The ID is 23241756 .

I'm liking the quick responses here.
My ticket on the portal seems to take just under 12 hours on average to get a reply.
Certainly a far cry from the average response time I was told to expect after posting the ticket.

My reasons for changing was very slow speeds (before breaching my monthly limit) at times when I needed things.
ie, I wanted to download the Java SDK and some other bits to do something for my course and it was actually quicker for me to drive to uni, pay to park, download the files there, transfer to my USB HDD and drive home again.
I attributed this to traffic shaping of some sort but I felt it was un-acceptable.
That's why I switched to the Pro package, no shaping applied.
This helped immensely and I was getting around 710kbps on file transfers.

Then, due to the format and reinstall of my laptop, I breached my monthly limit.
Now EVERYTHING is SLOOOOOW.
I'm sure my dial-up account back in the day felt nippier than this.

Speaking of which, can you tell me why my monthly usage stats haven't been reset yet?
I'm still crawling here and have some things I need to do for my course which I'd much rather do from the comfort of my living room than the uni labs that smell of BO.

So, if you had a package that allowed me to download things I needed (patches, games on steam, windows updates, usenet files, linux distros, etc) at times that aren't deemed as the middle of the night without worrying about being charged £20 extra per month or being dropped to dial-up speeds all for less than £25 per month, I'd consider it.

 

Surely this is just the terms of your contract? You break the monthly limits, you get slower intertubes - it makes sense. Of course if that's not for you, it's understandable that you'd want to switch ISPs, but getting in a strop because that's the way it works seems slightly OTT...

 

Hehe, I wouldn't say I'm in a strop.
I'm just disappointed as I've been with Plusnet for years and have referred loads of friends in the past.
Now, its practically unusable IMO due to severely restrictive FUP and throttling etc.

Can you honestly believe a restriction to 128k is acceptable?