Who to Choose?

BT or Plusnet? Business or Residential? Zen or IDnet?

Help! Who to choose? I'm lost and would really appreciate any advice about making a decision that ties me in for at least a year.

Thanks.

How much data do you think you'd use?

Is a static IP important?

What do you use the connection for, business or just home use?

Is UK based support important?

Is cheaper better or would you pay more for better support/services?

Edited by R0NSKI (Mon 15-Oct-12 22:21:59)

To date my data usage has been fairly conservative, but with fibre I can see using much more with media downloads - iPlayer, Netflix, etc.

Moderate home business use.

Uk support is preferable, but what I want is for it to be reliable. If and when it does go wrong, I want to be able to speak with someone who understands and is capable of solving the problem without repeating everything I say to them first! I guess that means I must pay more, but is there not a mid-price point that balances service and price. A difficult juggling act I know.

I moved from O2 LLU to IDNet Fibre for a year. I chose them largely for the same reasons that you are worrying about, but they were rather expensive. Now even more so.

After the year I jumped with heart in mouth to Plusnet and am now on Extra Fibre for £19.99pm, with 250GB peak allowance (upload is counted) and unlimited midnight to 8am. A couple of weeks ago I decided I'd like a fixed IP address again, to use the tbb BQM, so stumped up a one-time charge of £5.

I have no regrets about moving from IDNet.

Plusnet support on these forums is reasonably good, on the Community Forums is faster. Most problems have been seen before or new ones have multiple users getting it at the same time so lots of diagnostics, and pressure on PN to fix things.

I can also recommend Plus Net, I've been with them since 2003, whilst on ADSL I think I used their support once or twice, and once since moving to fibre in August. They were rather slow updating their products, but this was done in August and I now have an 80/20 product with 250GB allowance for £19.99 + line rental, with free midnight to 8am usage, there is very little throttling, and I believe that is only between 8pm and 10pm and only peer to peer.

With regard to my ADSL faults the service has been excellent, with my FTTC fault they got an engineer around pretty quickly, although I approached this through the forums as well. Although I'm not 100% satisfied my FTTC is correct, it seems a lot slower than most lines the same distance as mine, but then speed faults are very difficult to sort out and are down to Open Reach.

My brother had a ADSL problem in February which took two months to fix, but this was very much down to Open Reach, although we did go around in circles a bit with Plus Net - turns out Open Reach had only done half a job, which seemed to leave everyone in a state of confusion.

I moved to Fibre in August and do recommend Plus Net, it's also possible to get your broadband for free with them, they will even pay you each month. Just refer enough people and for each one that stays connected you will get a commission off your bill each month, only wish I could post my referral link on here but it's against forum rules

Edited by R0NSKI (Tue 16-Oct-12 10:08:28)

We too are on Plusnet - same package as RobertoS - after originally starting there due to my wife's company wanting that ISP when working from home.

While we both use the connection in a professional sense, we don't overload it heavily, and don't make use of P2P much. Video streaming *is* starting to get used more, but we still don't make much of a dent in the 250GB allowance. Traffic management doesn't get in our way - it is now pretty much unregulated on fibre, but even when they were being more cautious it worked well.

That they reduced the price for the "Extra Fibre" package, while increasing speed and allowance, is a good sign. They usually do some product refreshes each year - but you have to watch for these, and choose whether to take them.

They've also been pretty good at getting involved in trials of the new technology - including FTTC, FTTP, and the new speeds on both. They're a bit slower about converting the trials over to full commercial packages - but they usually treat trialists well.

Service over the phone is pretty good - and we had an excellent guy dealing with our last house move, and re-installation of FTTC. Having said that, there service on their own community forum is even better...

Our original install of FTTC, at our old house, didn't go smoothly at all - which was an issue with Openreach. However, it needed intervention from staff at Plusnet to get sorted. I got dedicated help from their forum staff, one it became obvious it wasn't a trivial problem.

In fact, that points out both Plusnet's greatest strength - their online forum staff - and their greatest weakness - that they depend on BT Openreach for all the installation & fault-fixing work.

It has to be pointed out that Plusnet are owned by BT. This probably has an effect on their strategic choices, but operationally they work as a fully independent ISP.

Should I be concerned about PlusNet's traffic management. I've read that they give priority to gaming over streaming. Moving to Fibre opens up all sorts of Video streaming options that I'd hate to find I'm being slowed down after moving.

Should I also consider a look at BT?

Thanks for all of the advice so far. It is really useful!

In reply to a post by dsch:

Should I be concerned about PlusNet's traffic management.

No, unless you are into P2P and Usenet between 8 and 10pm.

BT Retail can impose very heavy P2P throttling at unspecified times they find busy. I assume this is a truly dynamic criterion. Having said that, we see very few complaints here, but when we do they seem to be much slower than the Plusnet 2Mbps target.

Gaming uses so little bandwidth it should have no detrimental effect on streaming. The gaming prioritisation is to allow it to get decent latency when things are busy, that's all. Similarly with VOIP.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

BT Retail can impose very heavy P2P throttling at unspecified times they find busy. I assume this is a truly dynamic criterion. Having said that, we see very few complaints here, but when we do they seem to be much slower than the Plusnet 2Mbps target.

I've not seen any evidence of that yet at all on my Samknows tester, and I'm nearly a month installed