In reply to a post by professor973:

You are without doubt the most rude and irritating individual I have come across.

I wasn't going to respond to this, but if there were a contest between you and RobertoS for the most rude and irritating individual on these boards, you and your previous alter-ego(s) would win it hands down; I'm afraid you are rather deluded in that respect.

FWIW Plusnet is one of the best companies I have ever dealt with.

Have I missed something?

Possibly!
Top Quality ISP !

Doesn't look good. However, we only have the OP's version of events, and I was told recently by someone not to rely on that.

Back to the issue in this thread - once again you deliberately completely avoid my question and jump to something else.

Why? Is it an embarrassing question? It wasn't intended to be.

Plusnet were a great ISP, don't get me wrong. Now I think they are becoming a loss leader. Reason being is they used to have a reasonable pricing structure and didn't advertise much (a quiet, niche ISP), but nowadays I feel they are selling it off cheap and spreading it to the masses.

When I was with Plusnet (it was ADSL Max I should say), my download speed dropped from 6.5 Meg down to 3 Meg during peak times.

Some activities - namely YouTube streaming, gaming and downloading from Steam seemed to be slow all day (even when my connection speed was 6.5 Meg) this indicates rather heavy throttling in certain areas. Yes, peer-to-peer is throttled (or as they put it, slowed down).

Other things to consider are that I think the support is going downhill. It appears there are a few threads on here of late where support have made significant mistakes (lost them now but I'm sure I've seen some).

Something they did to me was when I called to complain about my performance due to throttling, the guy on the end of the phone was looking at my IP profile (set speed) and he set it to 0.5 by mistake. As I noticed the large drop in speed, I reported it as a fault. I suffered 1 week of a download speed of 0.29 Meg during which all Plusnet did was send me pretty speed graphs. They didn't tell me what the issue was in the end, the profile just sorted itself out and the stagnant support ticket was closed over time. I only realized what they'd done once I had put 2 and 2 together.

I'm with Sky now and it performs top notch, I haven't needed to contact support and the price is very good.

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

When I was with Plusnet (it was ADSL Max I should say), my download speed dropped from 6.5 Meg down to 3 Meg during peak times.

Do you mind if I ask how long ago that was? I ask as our capacity planning recently (several years) has been very good and we see very very little latency and slowdowns on our network during peak periods.

Some activities - namely YouTube streaming, gaming and downloading from Steam seemed to be slow all day (even when my connection speed was 6.5 Meg) this indicates rather heavy throttling in certain areas. Yes, peer-to-peer is throttled (or as they put it, slowed down).

As mentioned previously, we're updating that page as the speeds shown are much much lower than real life.

Other things to consider are that I think the support is going downhill. It appears there are a few threads on here of late where support have made significant mistakes (lost them now but I'm sure I've seen some).

I'm not going to say that we don't make mistakes, we do, everyone does. I'd like to think that when we're informed of an issue we do what we can to resolve it.

Something they did to me was when I called to complain about my performance due to throttling, the guy on the end of the phone was looking at my IP profile (set speed) and he set it to 0.5 by mistake. As I noticed the large drop in speed, I reported it as a fault. I suffered 1 week of a download speed of 0.29 Meg during which all Plusnet did was send me pretty speed graphs. They didn't tell me what the issue was in the end, the profile just sorted itself out and the stagnant support ticket was closed over time. I only realized what they'd done once I had put 2 and 2 together.

Sorry about that, as you've left there isn't a great deal I can do to help now but honestly that shouldn't happen.

In reply to a post by chrisparr:

Do you mind if I ask how long ago that was? I ask as our capacity planning recently (several years) has been very good and we see very very little latency and slowdowns on our network during peak periods.

That's as maybe, but I see fair fluctuations on my SNR, mostly through the day and into the evening, and especially in the evenings.

http://www.camieabz.co.uk/snr.png

Also, if I run a tracert, the bad hops are almost always Plusnet's hops. Just making the point.

Well we can't really affect the ongoing SNR, that's negotiated with the exchange equipment and your router, this changing has nothing at all to do with our capacity.

The bad hops on a tracert may well be because our network equipment is told to prioritise the actual routing of traffic above ping requests.

What's the real world quality of your connection like? Can you browse and stream without problems as these would be more indicative of issues than SNR fluctuations.

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

Do you mind if I ask how long ago that was? I ask as our capacity planning recently (several years) has been very good and we see very very little latency and slowdowns on our network during peak periods.

From late 2011-when I left in May this year is when the issues were really bad.

Most of the time it's fine. Occasionally there's a delay. The only real quibble is that before I could sync at 16000kbps with a profile of 14000, and speeds of 13350kbps. Granted, the sync wasn't stable over a an entire day, but with the Royal wedding, the jubillee, Euro 2012 and the Olympics it's been difficult finding a quiet month or so for long-term testing. I'm waiting for the Olympics to end so I can try things out a little more.

At present I sync at 14621kbps, with a profile of 13.8 Meg and am getting speeds no faster than 12.3 Meg, which seems a little stingy. Not complaining over the speed (it's far better than ADSL max), but last week my profile had dropped to 12.6 Meg and the throughput was 11.6 Meg.

It can drop in an instant, and takes an age to rise back up. Usually a BT speedtest or two sorts it after a couple of days though. If only there was a way for the BT systems to lock the profile (I appreciate the problems of a twitchy SNR make this idea problematic). While I know that 16,000 is too high for a stable line, 15,600 is stable, and the profile and throughput should be 13.8 Meg and 13.0 Meg respectively. Plus or minus 0.1 meg.

Question. The increase in capacity to coincide with the Olympics (Plusnet's and/or BTw's); will it remain in place afterwards, with a view to coping with BTO adding more 21CN and FTTx upgrades to the country?

Also, bear in mind that I'm on the Pro package, so can't comment on behalf of Extra / Value customers.