Can plusnet deliver 80Mb Fibre

Hi.

I'm looking around for a new ISP as I want to switch to Fibre. Currently with Sky and they could offer me 38Mb fibre for £20.

But PlusNet are offering 80Mb for £20.

can they really deliver on that?

Do they have a higher contention rate than others (Sky)?

Seriously interested.

Thanks for your help.

the speed depends on your distance from the cab

Thanks for the reply.

I was concerned that I decide to opt for the 80Mb speed but then find that PlusNet could only provide my with say 30Mb due to load on their system rather than quality and distance from the cab.

Anyone already have the 80Mb fibre from PlusNet? Is it good?

Cheers

the actual contention ratio is an unknown.

sky dont actively advertise their fiber pro product as they dont seemkeen on selling it whilst plusnet do.

as stated the line speed will be dependent on line quality, distance and crosstalk levels,. a checker will give you an estimated speed.

If you start an order on the plusnet site it will give you an estimate at the first stage. Or you can use the bt wholesale adsl checker (which also estimates FTTC).

Actual speeds vs line speed is dependent on various factors but the plusnet staff state line speed is expected on the unlimited product as long as the end point can keep up, and assuming no network outages.

As oldjim said it depends on your distance from the cabinet and the condition of your line. I am on the 80/20 product and actually get about 51/17. I have read lots of posts in the past where people say they are getting 77 down on Plusnet.

Basically an excellent service, though recently they I think have gained a lot of new customers and their support system has become overloaded. To counter this they are opening a new support centre, which I think will be on stream very shortly. Having said that when I have got through to support (or sometimes posted a message here), they have been very good.

The nature of a forum such as this is almost certainly the posts that are made are bias towards people who have had some thing go wrong, though this would be true of all the ISP forums.

The first thng to check is your fibre estimate. The best checker is the BT Wholesale one.

In your case, if you have your phone line rental with Sky, it will not recognise it. So if it doesn't, then use the Address checker option. Do not use the pure Postcode checker as that is highly unreliable in many areas.

Sky do provide the 80/20 service as well. Link. It may be however that the estimate for your line is below 40Mbps - see my first link. In which case they won't have offered you the 80/20. It costs £30 as well.

It's also possible it isn't available via their online ordering system. It certainly used to be by phone order only.

I seem to get full speed all the time. No signs of congestion at all.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/3170973854.png

Remember that Plusnet are owned by BT, hence they buy their capacity alongside BT's own Retail arm. Nice volume discounts mean they can afford to charge less.

They I'm sure do run on a higher contention ratio than Sky, however Sky necessarily attract heavy downloaders due to their advertising so it all seems to balance out.

Perfect. thanks so much for all your answers.

I think I will phone Sky tonight and see if they will do me a deal on the 80/20 product

Hi,

Never really had any problem with Plusnet's 80/20 product, it runs at full speed (in the mid-60s for me because of my distance from the cabinet) all the time.

Check the estimate! I gave you the link.

Pointless getting 80/20 if your line can only do 40/10. 80/20 doesn't double speeds! It just removes the cap.

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 17-Dec-13 17:48:34)

Thanks.

Bt wholesale estimate the full 80/20, well 79/19 actually.

Great. Now it's up to you .

I think you also need to check whether Sky will require you to take line rental with them as well, if it isn't already.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/3170973854.png

0ms ping there is something wrong with your cache! There is no way of 0ms ping!

Cache is fine. Ping is due to Flash being an jackass.

I'm based in a village 7miles North of Basingstoke and about 8miles South of Reading and for 10 years put up with a 2-3meg download / 150-300k upload ADSL that changed depending on which way the wind was blowing and got better when it rained.

When I first moved to the area, I was with Pipex who I had used since the very early days and things were fairly stable right up until Tiscali got involved and at that point, what little speed I did have would almost disappear at certain busy times of the day. Worse still was the support when a fault developed on the line. It took nearly 4 months of talking to Tiscali to both convince and for them to admit there was a problem and eventually arrange to send a BT engineer out.
Later when TalkTalk got involved, things went hill drastically and the final straw was after another line fault developed and they point blank refused to acknowledge a fault existed often giving the reason "You live in a village, what more do you expect?". That was even after I supplied them with years of line stats supporting what the line could do against what it was currently doing.

I then moved to PlusNet for the first time and the difference was simply bliss. Back to the early days of Pipex when you could at least speak to support techs that could step away from 'a script' and actually understand the problem. If they themselves couldn't help, they would find someone who could.
Within a week of joining Plusnet they has a BT Engineer out who find an intermittent break on my overhead cable between my property and the first pole. Despite my distance from the exchange, I was now regularily hitting 3.6Meg down, 350k up with no degradation of quality during the day.

Having had no issues at all whilst with Plusnet, I recently moved to FTTC and I'm about 100m away from the cabinet. My stats are in my signature and have been pretty much been cast iron / rock solid apart from 'one glitch' which was down to a BT issue.

I have 3 kids who will hammer my connection at times and I work from home and my line hasn't blinked once. Last night, my two sons were both streaming NetFlix movies in their own rooms and my daughter was streaming Spotify whilst doing her homework and I was still able to watch a YouTube 2060p HD (yes that is 2060p) without a single buffer all at 8.30pm.

YMMV but I've had no complaints at all with Plusnet in the years I've been with them.
If cost wasn't an issue, then there are others I would look at and Sky would be quite near the bottom of any list of ISP's I would use. We had many Sky users in the village who had constant problems especially during busy periods. Things did improve with Sky about 18months ago when our exchange finally became LLU (TalkTalk and Sky) which probably explains why our exchange was suddenly added to BT's FTTC roll-out.

Regards

Chris

Is the 20ms+ ping normal for Plusnet FTTC?

Sky is around 8ms.

At least with Sky you're not reliant on the BT Wholesale network which could get overloaded by any ISP using the BT Wholesale product.

I think once FTTC has reached high take up levels the BT Wholesale products will struggle and then it's likely to return to capped usage and/or higher prices. Whereas Sky and other LLU providers should be able to cope better as they are in control of the capacity at each exchange.

In reply to a post by 5km:

Is the 20ms+ ping normal for Plusnet

Fairly normal if interleaving is on, roughly 10ms if it's off. I flip between the two every couple of months at the whim of DLM, which is not unusual at my sort of distance from the cab (450m odd). You can't make general statements like "Sky is 8ms", there are too many variables and ISP is arguably the least of them.

this is dependent on location vs BT's nodes.

BT have no node near me so my pings on BT wholesale arent optimal. On easynet I used to get 9ms to london, BT wholesale its over 15ms, and on 20CN it was over 20ms.

On BT retail I know strange routing occurs as well eg. people in london or near to london see their traffic to london endpoints going via sheffield. However I dont know if plusnet has this weird routing as well, that may be limited to BT retail.

The bt wholesale network itself getting overloaded according to aaisp blogs is now uncommon and its not in BT's interest for that to happen as that then potentialy reduces throughput from isp's which reduces demand on backhaul which earns BT revenue.

I can tell you on infinity I see no signs of congestion at all 24/7 and that uses BT wholesale. Scouring sky's forums has more complaints regading congestion than BTr forums do.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 18-Dec-13 09:44:28)

In reply to a post by 5km:

I think once FTTC has reached high take up levels the BT Wholesale products will struggle and then it's likely to return to capped usage and/or higher prices.

In which case anybody taking it now will most likely be out of minimum term and able to migrate.

In reply to a post by 5km:

I think once FTTC has reached high take up levels the BT Wholesale products will struggle and then it's likely to return to capped usage and/or higher prices. Whereas Sky and other LLU providers should be able to cope better as they are in control of the capacity at each exchange.

BT Wholesale are trying not to be the bottleneck now with the advent of 21CN and FTTC. The better their network the more bandwidth they can sell to their customers, so everyone is happy.

I am with Plusnet on ADSL2+ but when FTTC is available soon, then I will have no problem to order it with Plusnet 80/20 Fibre Unlimited. I might also move my line rental over to Plusnet away from BT.