PlusNet

A friend of mine has just signed up for PlusNet on a rural exchange, and I set up her router for her today. The estimate from Plusnet was 3.5 megs, and it is synched at 4,400 kb and speedtests are showing about 3700 kb.

I had to download a service pack of 290 MB from Microsoft and eventually gave up, as it was coming in at less than 20kB. Is that normal at the weekend?

We use Plusnet at work, and while the connection is not thrashed it has been pretty reliable and dependable.

James

Plusnet download speeds >>>
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/do...

Traffic management >>>
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/tr...

Can be very variable, the old "central hopping" trick can work wonders when there's load balancing problems.

Using Usenet this afternoon I got about 0.1K on non-ssl, 7K using ssl then 5 mins later it did a quick rise to 790K.

Edited by jeff1106uk (Sun 13-Dec-09 20:15:26)

As Apprentice ha indicated with his links all PlusNet packages (other than those with Pro in their name) are throttled/shaped for non-interactive traffic. Your Microsoft Updates would typically come from a server farm such as Akamai. That's only allowed line speed from 00:00 to 12:00. That's the published nature of the plusnet package.

So if you were doing it in the afternoon you'd get far lower speeds. At peak time he might only get 256Kbps which is around 25 KB/sec maximum usable speed.

On top of that PN have had some serious congestion issues in the last two months which may have slowed things further. There seemed to be a hope this was improving.

Thanks guys

It was on Sunday afternoon. I think the best way will be to download it at home to a memory stick then take it up. I'm sure the connection will be fine for her, a little surfing and some emails will be the extent of her usage.

I was taken aback at the speed though.

James

Hi Nebulous,

It depends what package your friend is on, as per the link Apprentice has posted. Different products have different limits at different times. Akamai hosted downloads are counted in with the download servers.

If there's anything we can take a look at for you please let us know.