In reply to a post by Andrue:

Wow. The panic is strong in this one.

Another highlight for me was the guy complaining that he'd been without broadband for, I think, 4.5 hours, certainly no more than that, and it had apparently cost him a small fortunate.

He was paying one of the cheapest well known suppliers in the UK for their standard residential service and a 300 minute outage costs a small fortune.

The mind boggles. Are people this absurdly tight-fisted over everything or does it just seem to be broadband where people have an allergy of paying more than a moderately size round of drinks per month for service, even if it's used for mission critical business usage.

I work from home. The price I pay per month, without the line rental included, would make people's eyes bleed unless with A&A.

I soak up brief outages through tethering to 4G. It delivers perhaps 10Mb, more than enough for me to do most standard work operations with and actually audio conferencing.

Routing issues I have 2 VPN concentrators, one running SSL the other PPTP to my work network so can use that to access the rest of the world too.

I have a static IP address as I'm going to shortly be joining my home network to a Software Defined WAN solution wiithin our HQ which will build a network overlay for connecting me to HQ and to any other staff running the software. This ink will be dual path and protected - failover wiill be done via 4G.

I had a power cut at the start of the week.
Static computer kit unaffected as it is on a UPS (8-)
An initially expensive purchase, as were replacement batteries after 9 years, but it has saved me from a lot of frustration.

I'm on Sky fibre so am not suffering these problems.
What I find strange is everytime I compare SKY with Plusnet on this site Plusnet comes out on top for all categories including customer service.
Having been with Sky for a long time I have had one outage that lasted a few hours and Sky CS immediately offered to send an engineer which turned out not to be necessary as the problem was resolved by someone else somewhere else.
The reall strange thing to the comparison results is how "active" the PN forum is "usually complaints" and how "active" Sky forum is. In general the higher the activity the worse the ISP.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Wow. The panic is strong in this one.

Another highlight for me was the guy complaining that he'd been without broadband for, I think, 4.5 hours, certainly no more than that, and it had apparently cost him a small fortunate.

He was paying one of the cheapest well known suppliers in the UK for their standard residential service and a 300 minute outage costs a small fortune.

I admit that made me laugh too although I couldn't be bothered to start a war by pulling him up on it. If he had a business grade account with an SLA finance backed THEN he could whinge about it and possibly get something back.

Mind you I also agree on your other points. If he had any business sense he would have some sort of backup. I have 3 lines 1 I never use. one I use for pleasure (zen) and my business line which is nothing special but is all of the above and costs a few hundred quid a month. I am certainly (and including line rentals - 2 of which are just copper pair) hit the £300 a month mark. Obvs it's all for tax purposes

Edited by deleted (Fri 11-Sep-15 09:53:44)

In reply to a post by knicol46:

Has PlusNet ceased? My broadband is off, their online chat is off, their technical support lines dead tone, their customer service sales line diverting to a mailbox. Doesn't look good.

Plusnet did send out an e-mail a few months ago saying they were cutting off VoIP but it was worded as if they were ceasing to provide a phone service. it did send some customers into a panic!

In reply to a post by awontroba:

I had a power cut at the start of the week.
Static computer kit unaffected as it is on a UPS (8-)
An initially expensive purchase, as were replacement batteries after 9 years, but it has saved me from a lot of frustration.

I know what you mean. I have one which I think runs for 15-20 minutes. It's the size of 9 house bricks stacked together and is black and grey. But I've never had to use it yet.

In reply to a post by Nervous:

I'm on Sky fibre so am not suffering these problems.
What I find strange is everytime I compare SKY with Plusnet on this site Plusnet comes out on top for all categories including customer service.

Yeah I have always wondered why that was.. it's certainly not true from what I can see of their vocal customers.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by ZenUserJP:

I am sure they sold it more than twice.. Your paranoia really is quite severe and you should see a head shrink about it me thinks. it was he who told me about it after all)

You've lost me there... I linked to the discussion about Connectify which I remembered quite well. I wanted to enhance the conversation by adding some context.

I don't see what it's got to do with your head shrinking?

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.

In reply to a post by Nervous:

I'm on Sky fibre so am not suffering these problems.
What I find strange is everytime I compare SKY with Plusnet on this site Plusnet comes out on top for all categories including customer service.
Having been with Sky for a long time I have had one outage that lasted a few hours and Sky CS immediately offered to send an engineer which turned out not to be necessary as the problem was resolved by someone else somewhere else.
The reall strange thing to the comparison results is how "active" the PN forum is "usually complaints" and how "active" Sky forum is. In general the higher the activity the worse the ISP.

Apart from Sky's representatives being (SELL MAD) I've always found there service to be very good and stable, and since they launched their Pro services I've considered them many times as a service provider... my only hag up on Sky's BB is the thrown upon using 3rd party equipment...

But then the Sky Hubs seam very reasonable for the service that is intended and many forget that Sky isn't exactly designed with advanced usage in mind.

In reply to a post by Malwaremike:

The Government is pushing us to use the internet for everything from car tax to filing our tax returns, never mind everyday business. I can understand a local fault, but tens of thousands of PN customers were cut off without a word of explanation. Am I being unreasonable in considering this is unacceptable, as BB has become a public utility like gas or electricity?

Yes I agree, Broadband is "more a less" a utility now but without any/many regulations in place for service up time guarantee's and the huge variables across the "Broadband Grid" if you will, it seems like something that will not be pushed for some time.