Newly installed Plusnet Extra Fibre (help please!!!!)

Ok so I have just got Plusnet fibre installed and was told to be expecting speeds of 37mb. Earlier today I checked my speed with speedtest.net and was pleasantly surprised to see my Download speed was 35.00mb download, 1.60mb upload and around 9ms ping. After that I rechecked my speed later in the evening and saw it to be only 23mb or so download, and the ping was around 11ms, sometimes even 50ms or 100ms at some times. I know that you need to wait for the first 10 days for the connection to stabilise. Can I expect 35 or even 37mb download and a 10ms ping when the connection stabilises? If anyone could inform me on the topic it would be greatly appreciated!

You can see some details of Plusnet's management of your fibre broadband product here

http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/br...

and another thread about evening speeds here

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fibre/t/4006891-eve...

Edited by Squirrel (Wed 01-Jun-11 00:15:20)

Thanks alot for the quick reply. In the plusnet link, it seems that the broadband speed is only capped after midnight. I saw the decrease in connection speed at around 7pm , so I don't think that is an issue. From what I have gathered from various websites, the download speed will increase over the next 10 days. So say the highest speed I test is 37mb (download), would I get this speed constantly when the connection stabilises after the 10 days?

I read the page as saying the management applies from 6pm to midnight

Don't forget that it's not just at your ISP where a bottleneck can occur.

During busy periods, my exchange backhaul measured by BT Speedtester hovers between about 17Mbps and 24Mbps, with the lowest having been around 14Mbps or so. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth you have through your ISP at that point, as you'll be limited by the exchange capacity.

On the other hand, there will be times when the exchange capacity will be higher than your ISP's throughput. Mine has dropped below 7Mpbs at busy times, but the exchange was capable of over 17.

When other users start joining your cabinet, you may find the speeds drop due to that too. Mine started out at 38Mbps download and is now down to 32Mbps due to interference from other lines. I have read of others who started at 38Mbps and dropped to 28Mbps or less.

jayteedc

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Thanks alot for the quick reply. In the plusnet link, it seems that the broadband speed is only capped after midnight. I saw the decrease in connection speed at around 7pm , so I don't think that is an issue. From what I have gathered from various websites, the download speed will increase over the next 10 days. So say the highest speed I test is 37mb (download), would I get this speed constantly when the connection stabilises after the 10 days?

It would be interesting to see what happens around the change over times from peak to off-peak. But it seems daft to be limiting the overall connection speed on a fibre connection - surely there's a conflict in Plusnet's own T&Cs here?

On the bog standard "Plusnet Extra" package, then management applies from 6PM to midnight, but the detailed speed page shows browsing as running at line speed even in the evening period - and most speed testers seem to get classified as "browsing".

However, the "Plusnet Extra Fibre" package has very different management tactics applied, that negates some of the very usefulness of fibre IMHO. The details are on the same detailed speed page. There you get controlled on many protocols at the 5Mb and 10Mb level during daytime, *plus* restrictions in the evening peak hours - but thankfully less restricted than the bog-standard Extra package

But the one that most likely applies here is that, on "Extra Fibre", browsing is restricted to 20Mbps in the 6pm-11pm slot.

It seems like, to make the most of the fibre, you need to be streaming, downloading *and* browsing at the same time.

To be honest, if you don't need the volume of 120GB on "Extra Fibre", it could be considerably better to fall back to the "Value Fibre" package (£5 less, with 40GB limit), then add the "Pro" addon (£5 extra) to get line speed of everything, all day, for the same price.

Can only assume with this that Plusnet are trying to run a viable business model. Surely 20Mbps for browsing will be more than suffcient for the large majority of home users (not withstanding homes with 10 PCs / Laptops all browsing at the same time)...

Despite the improvement in speeds, I would assume that web designers will still design their sites for a reasonable Kbps (or low Mbps) connection as opposed to a 40 Mbps connection (lowest common denominator and all).

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

To be honest, if you don't need the volume of 120GB on "Extra Fibre", it could be considerably better to fall back to the "Value Fibre" package (£5 less, with 40GB limit), then add the "Pro" addon (£5 extra) to get line speed of everything, all day, for the same price.

That makes sense - check your usage after the first month to see whether it's viable.

In practice I don't think the 20Mb limit on browsing between 6 and 11pm makes a lot of difference; the other speed restrictions are likely to have more effect. Note that the Value Fibre package was limited to 10Mb between 8 and 10pm when it was launched - blowing my own trumpet a bit, I was the one that got it increased to 20!

Edited by kasg (Wed 01-Jun-11 15:16:33)

Basically, Plusnet have made it too complicated