I'm relatively satisfied with Plusnet as an ISP, and due to the LLU competition at my exchange the prices are on par with TalkTalk.
I have been with them for 18 months or so now, and originally took out the 12 month contract with the "free" router. With hindsight, I wouldn't have bothered with that, and could have saved the delivery cost (I wasn't particularly interested in the shorter contract length though).
The Plusnet-provided Thomson TG585v7 is useless to me. It syncs the lowest out of every router I have on hand here, including a Netgear DG834G v2 with the notorious (on ADSLMax) AR7. Not only is it slower, but it's unreliable (crashes or needs manual reboots), runs hot, poor wireless range, extensive configuration pages, yet missing the things you actually need, and various other annoyances. Unless the v8 is far superior, I wouldn't miss any sleep over not being offered one. At least it's fairly attractive, compared to say, the 2wire 2700HG-V. God knows what kind of cost-cutting Thomson used to make a Broadcom router perform so poorly.
If it's worth £40, I'd rather spend half of that on a reconditioned Netgear DG834G v4.
Edited by deleted (Fri 23-Dec-11 12:52:52)