British broadband a scandle

Scathing report about British Broadband in the Times
Including PlusNet

Times Online

"Including PlusNet "

Had to look hard to find the mention of Plusnet....... and then I find that it's evening performance is 3 times times better than Talk Talk according to the survey but I wonder when and where they made their survey because here is my speed test from yesterday evening 26-08-2006 21:38:45 6153.2
But all in all I feel the article is correct in what it says regarding UK broadband.

Don

Reads like a nice honest bit of reporting to me. When a friend recently asked for a recommendation I said things were very much like they have been portrayed in that article. We decided that Zen was the right choice on that occasion as cost wasn't the main consideration.

At present I'm sitting tight with PN because they haven't caused me enough trouble (yet!) to make move. If I jump ship it will probably be to Zen though there's always the worry that the founders will sell it to a big corporate and it will go down the pan.

Nice post and no argument from me on any of the points you have raised. UK broadband has a long way to go before it catches up with the rest of the world.I particularly liked your reference to the "Ferguson" comment which is well proved by what happened to various ISP's when the "which is the cheapest, unlimited ISP" brigade moved in....... not long after download limits were introduced or they are struggling.

As for

In reply to:

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and then I find that it's evening performance is 3 times times better than Talk Talk according to the survey

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From my previous experience of TalkTalk, I would say that is about right. From 9am - 1am I couldn't even complete a speedtest here at ADSLguide. Although I've had a couple of disconnections here in the last few day, the service I'm getting is still an awful lot better than the service from TalkTalk. So many website connections used to drop packets like a drunk postman, it made multiplayer java gaming an impossibility.

Since changing to Plusnet, I've rediscovered the web, great ping times, no lost packets and fantastic download speeds. The recent disconnections have been a bit of a disappointment but I haven't lost all hope in Plusnet yet.

What a refreshingly knowledgeable article -- and congrats to AG Andrew for telling it how it is. I guess loads of disenchanted ISP customers will be writing to the Sunday Times' Stewart Mitchell now to tell him about the horrors he didn't get around to including -- such as PlusNet's concerted campaign to make it almost impossible to contact their support staff by phone or ticket and the LLU lock-in debacle.

Talk Talk's admission that they haven't actually upgraded yet from 2MB to 8MB despite advertising their service as up-to-8MB is a real gem. I don't read their forum here and assume that this won't be news to some people, but it's really shocking.

It seems that PlusNet's 'industry-leading' cons have alerted the whole industry to the fact that they can lie and rob people blind since it is almost impossible to nail the blame on the ISP's door.

I noted last night that Seb of this parish has been drafting an ISP complaints procedure guide. The sooner it goes live, the better.

Simon

"The recent disconnections have been a bit of a disappointment"

I have a few of those but not that many to be of any concern, and for me at least I am convinced they are not of Plusnets doing.A little while back when i was getting them constantly for a while I decided to try and find out what was going on so one time when it happened I phoned support and said "I seem to be disconnected can you look at your system and see if you can tell me the reason?" a few sounds of a keyboard being tapped and the result came back that suprised me somewhat "that the disconnection was at customers request" so I decided to pay more attention to what the lights on the router were doing, and in the end I noticed that the "DSL" light was actually flickering and failing first which is the indication of the state of connection with the exchange, with of course the "internet" light failing shortly afterwards which is my connection with the ISP so in the end I just learned to live with it and sooner or later the lights would come up again.But that may just be my expaerience and totally different to yours.

I used to suffer from exactly the same disconnections, and came to the same conclusion as yourself and learned to live with it.

The most remarkable thing for me is that the disconnections ceased the moment I migrated from Plusnet and have never re-occured.

Edited by yorkie_pudd (Sun 27-Aug-06 17:04:17)

"The most remarkable thing for me is that the disconnections ceased the moment I migrated from Plusnet and have never re-occured. "

Well that blows my theory :-)