In reply to a post by MHC:

Earlier today agreed a new 2 year contract with them, moving from FTTC to FTTP ... so their management are still planning to be around for a while.

Means very little to be honest, they offered me a 2 year contract, if they vanished then they would have transferred me to EE. I presume they would give people a choice to transfer or move to a different ISP. i would have been gone. People I know that are on EE say their customer service is as bad as BT, so I presume they use the same call centres.

In reply to a post by bure:

Someone referred to PN offering 12 month contracts
Can that be confirmed

They do to existing customers, but the prices are not good, but only on FTTC, not FTTP. !8 months and 12 months are the same price, 24 is cheaper

Plusnet are going to continue to be the "value brand" for home internet, while EE branding will replace BT.
Can't reveal source but they are 100% in the know.

I read that Plusnet isn't going to do voice over broadband, so come 2025 they will only offer broadband over ADSL/FTTC/FTTP and at that point they may lose (or not) some customers.

By the end of 2025 there will be no PSTN - but from September 2023 (!) you won't be able to get a new PSTN line or transfer one. So in 2 months Plusnet won't be able to offer any new customer a phone line at all (PSTN, VoiP, or mobile).

In reply to a post by sheephouse:

By the end of 2025 there will be no PSTN - but from September 2023 (!) you won't be able to get a new PSTN line or transfer one. So in 2 months Plusnet won't be able to offer any new customer a phone line at all (PSTN, VoiP, or mobile).

They'll offer a broadband service, and may suggest those than need "landline equivalent" go to EE or BT for "Digital Voice". A third party VoIP service will work of course.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Email has been a nightmare for ISPs for years, even Virgin Media has dropped email for new customers. Sky used to outsource to Google, but that became too costly. Cheaper to get your own mailbox from one of the big providers, Google (Gmail), Microsoft (outlook.com) or Yahoo with adverts - OR - pay for a professional service with no ads if you have a domain (MS 365 Exchange Online is £3+tax per month per user).

But why? I know years ago there was a free mailbox goldrush, I presume that failed because there wasn't a practical way to make an API pay so they resorted to making customers use webmail and Gmail pretty much cleaned out that market.

It seems as if modern ISPs just resell wholesale services and running their own servers for their customers' benefit is too much like work requiring in-house IT that they'd rather dispense with.

In reply to a post by obroad:

But why?

Spam. The volume, and the cost of the computing power required to remove it before it hits your mailbox. The larger the scale (Google, Microsoft) they can see the spam coming into their domains and other domains and see it is the same and delete it from all incoming at the same time.

I know years ago there was a free mailbox goldrush, I presume that failed because there wasn't a practical way to make an API pay so they resorted to making customers use webmail and Gmail pretty much cleaned out that market.

Most ISPs used free software, which then didn't scale. They then outsourced to Gmail for a while, then Yahoo for a while, but many are back in house.

It seems as if modern ISPs just resell wholesale services and running their own servers for their customers' benefit is too much like work requiring in-house IT that they'd rather dispense with.

They run their own networks at tens of gigabits which is complex enough. Running terabytes of data storage and the multi-site backups and looking after it, is not remotely the same business as providing a routable IP address to the internet.

Running email is a costly business, and getting it wrong and losing customers email is worse than not supplying the service. Especially when the likes of Google or Microsoft will sell you business grade email for £3+tax a month, or you can have advertising supported for free.

Most US providers provided only 1 mailbox even years ago, perhaps it was a UK oddity that every ISP gave you 10 or more mailboxes. Started with Demon internet giving you SMTP direct to your dial up host - wouldn't work today, your dial up link would be full of junk mail

Edited by jchamier (Mon 17-Jul-23 13:22:15)

In reply to a post by PhilipSmith72:

Plusnet are going to continue to be the "value brand" for home internet, while EE branding will replace BT.
Can't reveal source but they are 100% in the know.

I heard similar a few years ago. The plan then was EE for the tech savvy people, BT for the traditional people and Plusnet for the value customers. They seem to have decided they don't need to keep the BT part now.

In terms of people apart from the call centres everything is BT Consumer now, over the last few years the EE & Plusnet people have been moved onto BT contracts. I think Plusnet HQ in Sheffield is just a contact centre these days, the networks etc. are run as part of the wider BT.

They'll offer a broadband service, and may suggest those than need "landline equivalent" go to EE or BT for "Digital Voice". A third party VoIP service will work of course.

Yes, but I'm thinking that selling Plusnet to anybody who wants a phone isn't going to be easy - if you have to go elsewhere for a phone why not go there for broadband too?

In reply to a post by jchamier:

They'll offer a broadband service, and may suggest those than need "landline equivalent" go to EE or BT for "Digital Voice".

IIRC only BT are offering Digital Voice so any Plusnet or EE customers wishing to keep a voice service will have to migrate BT if they wish to stay with a BT Group company.