Home/Business - Truly Unliimited

Apologies, I'm sure this has been asked before, but are the Home and/or business unlimited products truly unlimited, and outside the scope of the traffic management system PlusNet has in place?

Cheers,
AP

Hi there,

Yes they are truly unlimited, and while there is prioritisation on the Unlimited services to ensure things like streaming and gaming aren't interrupted by downloads or peer to peer there are no rate limits applied to anything (if there were, we wouldn't be able to call it Unlimited).

Hope that reassures you.

The total throughput on your line is totally unlimited, no FUP or anything similar, you can max out your line using any protocol or mix of protocols.

Why would they want to degrade the service by not using intelligent traffic management to prioritise your traffic so that when you are maxing out your line things like VoIP, streaming and gaming are not affected by background tasks like file downloads or P2P?

This is worth a read . It helped to convince me to upgrade to Unlimited when it came out.

Matthew,

I was seriously considering signing up to plusnet as i like the idea of the traffic management. However looking at the usage graphs recently plusnet appear to be suffering congestion and regrading traffic accordingly.

Is this due to a lack of capacity and therefore bad planning or just because plusnet charge so little for fibre that you cannot afford to keep up with capacity?

Paul

Not sure why you think that? We moved some traffic into a different queue to protect the network just in case iOS7 caused an impact, looking at feedback we've had since then there has been very very few complaints from this.

We are adding a lot of capacity, pretty much on a monthly basis designed to keep us ahead of forecast.

http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1378113996.htm
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1375270282.htm
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1372325762.htm
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1370248553.htm

etc

Yes but on this occasion it seems that you didnt predict this properly and should a big event occur then it looks like plusnet simply cannot cope and would solely be reliant on traffic management. But thats obvioulsy the price you pay when your cheaper than everyone else.

barker04 if u don't like plusnet, I suggest to look elsewhere! Why are u complaint about plusnet traffic management?

I had no issues with plusnet traffic management.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Why are u complaint ...

English please someone.........

Where has any PlusNet customer complained?

You too are believing the myth that traffic prioritisation is bad, and making the huge assumption that other ISPs do not also practice it. PlusNet put out a huge amount of information about their network. Most others, including BT/Sky/TalkTalk almost zilch.

Can you show us any such graphs from any other major ISP, showing the absence of any heavy loading? If not, the criticism is null and void. "We don't traffic manage, slow you down, or ever ever suffer from congestion. Just believe us - sucker!"

Ah, no! They don't say the bit about no congestion.

No doubt like all of us you believe Zen to be a good but pricy ISP? So what about this? :-

Class of Service

Traffic is managed across the network by assigning applications to traffic classes. Zen�s IP VPN solution offers six Classes of Service (CoS) with each having its own level of service priority and associated Service Level Agreement (SLA). Applications are
typically allocated as follows:

Class Service Priority and Applications

1 IP telephony
2 Video Conferencing / Media Streaming / Business Critical Applications
3 VoIP call signalling and Business Critical Application, e.g. Citrix
4 Business Critical Application, e.g. SAP
5 Business Critical Application / Bulk Data Transfer
6 Standard traffic, e.g. email / Internet traffic etc

Looks remarkably like PlusNet's classifications to me .

Thats a very good point I just assumed that BT infinity for example would have more bandwidth than plusnet based on price point but as you say there is no data to back it up.

Actually i guess thats not true, i suspect the thinkbroadband graphs collated might show a trend - are these available anywhere?

Sorry I came across a bit strong in that post. I just get mad when people like you get influenced by nay-sayers whose prejudices stop them thinking through what they are complaining about.

Plus it is so easy when looking at the volume of PlusNet information and seeing where questions can legitimately be asked - as you are rightly doing, not to ask the same questions about the competition. You can't, because they don't publish it.

I'm not claiming that PlusNet are the bee's knees, but they suit me and I believe they have a great retention percentage. Which means they must have a high customer satisfaction index.

These graphs no longer show speed ratings - they were a bit silly anyway. That's why the top graph only starts a few months ago, it replaces the speed one.

I'd better give it a rest. I'm ranting rather a lot. I've said a few times elsewhere that my short list would be BT, Sky, and PlusNet, and it now looks as though Zen come into the frame with their new cheaper unlimited packages. (See the IDNet thread).

I'm only asking these questions as want to be sure im making the right choice when i probably choose plusnet for fibre when it arrives soon.

Otherwise i need to be assured that the additional to cost to BT or whoever is justified....

Thanks for the advice and clarification

http://blog.thinkbroadband.com/2013/05/so-how-fast-a...

Is more what I think was meant by data. Not ran the plusnet numbers as it takes time that I am using to get other stuff done

You're asking all the right questions . But interpreting the answers with nothing similar for the others is difficult, unless a disaster area shows up. It hasn't done.

Are you also aware of Table 2.8 on this page, in case you do become unhappy?

I think someone else asked - have you checked you are in a Market 2 or 3 exchange?

Luckily market 3 - and thanks for the table thats very very reasonable in terms of prices to leave early!

Funny really - I signed up by phone, having decided against BT because of the hopelessness of the BT sales staff compared to the PN ones, and it was only after I signed up they pointed that out to me, as I was still a bit concerned at the 18-month commitment.

So they didn't use it as an incentive, but I was mighty glad to be told about it!

That was in Feb 2012, and I upgraded from 40/2 to 76/20 in January 2013 when the "unlimited" came out. That meant restarting my 18 months.

You can still get caught with paying for the "free" router if you leave within 12 months, and perhaps installation fees as well. I haven't checked recently. I doubt if you will leave, at least from dissatisfaction.

An important thing is the level of support offered by the Digital Care Team. They visit here most days, and monitor the Community forums closely. Like any ISP, first-line support can sometimes be problematical, though I haven't found so yet, but the Digital Care team are excellent and can pull strings/kick ass.

He speaks it fine he just writes in character on here.

looking at the graphs tonight

http://www.plus.net/support/service/network_performa...

Quite a few are currently maxed out - how does this affect traffic priority and is there any more capacity planned for soonish?

sorry to ask more questions am thinking of joining!

Quite a few are currently maxed out - how does this affect traffic priority and is there any more capacity planned for soonish?

What makes you say that?

They are a bit lower now but about 20 minutes ago 2 of the 3 WBC pipes were maxd out (i.e had a total outbound that matched that of the maximum).

Surely that shows that the pipes are at capacity?

In reply to a post by barker04:

They are a bit lower now but about 20 minutes ago 2 of the 3 WBC pipes were maxd out (i.e had a total outbound that matched that of the maximum).

Surely that shows that the pipes are at capacity?

"Max" means maximum value recorded during the graph's time period, not the maximum size of the pipe (which is not actually displayed).

The graphing software they use auto scales the y axis to the peak, so even if the pipes were peaking at 50% of capacity the graph will still show it going right to the top.

It is interesting to see some of the inner workings of an ISP.

They have different nodes that users connect to
They look to balance across all nodes, as the users are evenly spread.
The traffic upload/download profile of each node shows the same profile, so capacity management looks to be simple, we are creatures of habbit
Users are measured by being connected, which for ADSL means the modem is on. You could use these stats to work out the % of users who switch their model off during the day
Only they know the actual capacity of their nodes, but I would assume at least a 25% failure rate that needs to be carried by the rest

In reply to a post by iand:

I would assume at least a 25% failure rate that needs to be carried by the rest

I'd be rather surprised if it was that high on a daily basis.

its not, but if you look at the different pipes and then assume several of them actually fail at the same time, then the rest need to carry the load. Hence the 25% failure rate was a design decision assumption that says, I can fail up to 25% of the core pipes and I am still ok. Anything more and the end users may start to see a the problem as the rest can not carry the load. Some companies may have a 50% failure figure or even a 100% failure, with automatic duplicate capacity switch on.