PlusNet do seem to be going through a bad time again at the moment. They are an ISP with peaks and troughs - at their peak they have been an excellent ISP but when they hit a trough they become dreadful. I almost went back to PlusNet at the start of the year but they were seeing some issues and have, from what I've seen, continued to go down hill throughout this year.

I suspect in a year or 2's time they will be back on form again but they are too inconsistent for me to want to use them at present.

In reply to a post by ian72:

PlusNet do seem to be going through a bad time again at the moment. They are an ISP with peaks and troughs - at their peak they have been an excellent ISP but when they hit a trough they become dreadful.

Their customer service is in a right state at the moment but the network is mostly fine. There's the on-going single/multi threading download issue but I'm not convinced that's affecting vast numbers of customers and my experience of it is that it's easily cured and only hits me every couple of months.

I remain a bit annoyed that they haven't yet fixed it but that's more of a professional annoyance than anything else. In practical terms the service they offer is fine.

to be fair many business aimed solutions can be bad as well, e.g. the business customers on plusnet did not escape this outage.

Of course you are right tho, if broadband was changed to a utility service and as such have higher reliability requirements prices would go up. I dont think speeds would be regulated but just packet loss, so policing would allow an isp to still contend highly, and run their pipes hot but without the packet loss and latency increases. Thats what entanet used to do, policing, remember their system where speeds would drop in steps down to 2mbit/sec when their centrals were hot? To be fair that system was pretty good, entanet's downfall however was they started relying on it as normal practice and the amount of time it needed to kick in started getting very silly e.g. all day on a sunday. But it is the best traffic management system I have ever seen on an isp, it controlled latency and packet loss and didnt discriminate based on types of traffic.

In reply to a post by ZenUserJP:

I apologise I thought you were implying that I was the person who started the thread. I got confused and that came out in my post.

I've found it to be okay and it uses the wifi and the ethernet card in my PC quite well. But it does have it's flaws.

I'm fairly sure no-one thinks you're adslmax!

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by ian72:

PlusNet do seem to be going through a bad time again at the moment. They are an ISP with peaks and troughs - at their peak they have been an excellent ISP but when they hit a trough they become dreadful.

Their customer service is in a right state at the moment but the network is mostly fine. There's the on-going single/multi threading download issue but I'm not convinced that's affecting vast numbers of customers and my experience of it is that it's easily cured and only hits me every couple of months.

That issue seems to be affecting a little bit more than just download speeds, I seem to find issue with certain services, these issue's I can only put down to some issue with Plusnet's links to outside networks (or with BT even!) or Plusnet QOS "type" system seems to be having a freak out!

I had full speed the other night (60Mbps both Single and Multithread) however streaming Now TV and various national radio stations on the Sonos system was impossible, this was also along side terrible variable browsing... funny enough hopping gateway then left me with slower speeds (20-30Mb/s) but I could stream both Now TV and Radio fine.... browsing was still slow but didn't vary by a few seconds and few minutes so much and was more 4-15 seconds.

Either way poor service all round, never have I suffered such "strange" issues and it also looks like the opinion from its customers I got a few months back when we first heard about support hour changes which was "Happy with Plusnet, but worry they won't be able to support us when something goes wrong" ....

Amazing how the futre was told by many customers huh!

Could well be

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

In reply to a post by ZenUserJP:

I apologise I thought you were implying that I was the person who started the thread. I got confused and that came out in my post.

I've found it to be okay and it uses the wifi and the ethernet card in my PC quite well. But it does have it's flaws.

I'm fairly sure no-one thinks you're adslmax!

Phew!

adslmax is adslmax after all!

In reply to a post by ZenUserJP:

Phew!

adslmax is adslmax after all!

And pcoventry76 is pcoventry76 as well

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by ZenUserJP:

Phew!

adslmax is adslmax after all!

And pcoventry76 is pcoventry76 as well

But is professor973 professor973 and why isn't he here slagging off Plusnet?

I'm out of contract with them at the moment and my BT contract ends in December. I'll give PN until then to fix the network issues. I don't really want the hassle of changing my WAN address. But once I'm a free agent it seems a good time to look around for someone new. I might even go to AAISP although the pricing there still seems a bit high even including line rental.