Sky to Plusnet Fibre

I'm on Sky Unlimited, full LLU. Fibre has been rolled out to my town (Dorchester), but Sky are dragging their heels on updating their equipment to support Fibre.

So, was considering moving to PlusNet Unlimited Fibre + Calls.

Would cost about the same as Sky anyway - Sky are £20 for Fibre, ultimately, Plusnet would be 19.99 (after six months of 9.99).

Sky broadband support really annoy me. The first line is awful, second line, if you can get it - are better. I'm seeing mixed responses to Plusnet support, but I'm fairly sure it can't be worse than Sky.

So anyway - is it worth the move do you think? Or do you think I'm just lining myself up for repeated bashing my head against the wall trying to get off Sky LLU?

From what I've seen with people's issues when coming off LLU I'd suggest migrating to Plusnet on plain ADSL first and then immediately that is up and running order the upgrade to fibre. The problem with that is that if you got an introductory discount you might lose it when you upgrade.

I've no experience of Sky, but I migrated from Be Unlimited ADSL2+ LLU to PlusNet Fibre Unlimited 10 days ago. I was one of the unfortunate customers who got put on to the 40/10 instead of the 80/20 product. It seems this was a "programming error" in the automated sign-up process which ordered the wrong product from BTOR. Once the problem was recognised I was upgraded fairly quickly, and as far as I understand the issue has now been fixed with the sign-up process - perhaps a PlusNet rep would care to comment on that.

So although there was an unfortunate hiccup with my migration, I feel that PlusNet dealt with it reasonable well and I'm satisfied with the customer service aspect. As for the Fibre Unlimited product, now it's working properly I'm very happy indeed. Throughput has been excellent at all times of the day I've been using it, and other performance criteria such as ping times, latency, jitter seem very good. I don't use p-2-p, torrents or gaming so I can't comment on those, but downloads are fast and the service has been reliable so far - it's early days yet. But I'm certainly noticing that I no longer suffer from the dropped packet problems I had on Be.

My phone is due to be migrated from BT to PlusNet on Monday, so can't comment on that either.

Overall, I'm very happy I made the change to PlusNet, especially with the half-price rental offer for the first 6 months. Definitely a better deal than BT Infinity.

OP wouldn't be eligible for 9.99/month fibre unlimited for 6 months if done by switching while on ADSL and not going direct to fibre from PN.

especially with the half-price rental offer for the first 6 months.

Luck so-and-so... I'd take that if I could get it (fibre delayed in my area until May 2005).

I started with PN end of March 2003... and just wish that existing customers could get a similar discount for upgrading from ADSL to fibre.

In reply to a post by Bright:

Once the problem was recognised I was upgraded fairly quickly, and as far as I understand the issue has now been fixed with the sign-up process - perhaps a PlusNet rep would care to comment on that.

Problem now fixed. We've still got in flight orders completing though, so they'll need upgrading then they activate, but an order placed now should run through correctly as 80/20.

Do Plusnet traffic manage on fibre?

Looks like it. I use P2P as well.

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

This is one thing Sky doesn't do. OK, could pay an extra £5 for pro to get rid of that.

We don't "manage" the speed down. If you are just P2Ping, it will come down as fast as your connection can handle*

*caveats around exchange contention, times when the network is in an emergency state etc. Have a look at some of my other posts in this forum and read: http://community.plus.net/blog/2012/12/21/its-unlimi...

True, you could pay an extra £5 to make streaming, browsing etc worse if you have P2P running in the background.

So what's the OP's best path to Plusnet phone and fibre from Sky MPF Kelly?

Morning,

Just asked our Provisioning team about this one. Looks like if it's LLU with MPF we'd place a sim provide for Phone and Broadband, depending on engineer availability for the fibre install it'd be at least two weeks (if it were placed today).

Unfortunately the sim provide isn't guaranteed so if something does go wrong with that there'd be another fibre provide lead time to wait once the phone went active, but while that is worth mentioning it's an outside chance.

Oh - also a MAC wouldn't be required for this, but it would be scuppered if any ceases or cancellations were placed by the losing provider.

Hope that helps,

That's what I thought, but wasn't sure enough to tell the poster .

SIM provides are always risky, as you say. One of the major drawbacks of being on MPF .

There's also a tendency for users to cancel services with the provider without meaning to.

I think it's a good idea for the user to ask for a MAC even when not needed. Helps dispute concellation chages, as long as PN follow the OR procedure for SIMs from MPF.

So, traffic management is managed at an individual level?

I download a torrent file and do nothing else, this utilises my full connection speed...
As I download, I start to watch a Youtube vid or take a VOIP call. Presumably, my torrent file will slow down to prioritise the other services?

Rather than, P2P is managed globally and deprioritised right through the network?

Thanks RobertoS and Matthew for explaining the process.

Am tempted.

In reply to a post by white43:

So, traffic management is managed at an individual level?

I download a torrent file and do nothing else, this utilises my full connection speed...
As I download, I start to watch a Youtube vid or take a VOIP call. Presumably, my torrent file will slow down to prioritise the other services?

That is exactly right.

In reply to a post by white43:

Rather than, P2P is managed globally and deprioritised right through the network?

This also applies HOWEVER, we provision enough bandwidth so that the latter would only happen if we were having problems. E.g. if part of our network failed meaning that the bit that remained was oversubscribed.

This means that in an emergency situation, your VoIP/Gaming/Web Browsing still works, but your downloads would be slower. You can see from of the threads starting on here that people are talking about their P2P and Usenet coming down at full speed at peak hours. We aim to keep that speed.

We think this is a nice feature of the way we do things.

In reply to a post by KellyD:

we provision enough bandwidth so that the latter would only happen if we were having problems. E.g. if part of our network failed meaning that the bit that remained was oversubscribed.

This means that in an emergency situation, your VoIP/Gaming/Web Browsing still works, but your downloads would be slower. You can see from of the threads starting on here that people are talking about their P2P and Usenet coming down at full speed at peak hours. We aim to keep that speed.

We think this is a nice feature of the way we do things.

I think you're onto a winner here as long as it works as described and there's enough bandwidth available.

However, there's a lingering suspicion that you will run out of bandwidth and the emergency situation will become the norm.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I think it's a good idea for the user to ask for a MAC even when not needed. Helps dispute concellation chages, as long as PN follow the OR procedure for SIMs from MPF.

You can't get a MAC issued on MPF. Unless you are suggesting a user asks for a MAC even in the knowledge that the ISP is unable to issue one?

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

However, there's a lingering suspicion that you will run out of bandwidth and the emergency situation will become the norm.

Yep. Totally accept that. If it happened, it would be Dave and I getting it in the neck, so we're invested!

In reply to a post by KellyD:

Yep. Totally accept that. If it happened, it would be Dave and I getting it in the neck, so we're invested!

I suppose one thing people are wondering, how your big brother BT are having to throttle people quite heavily, and yet Plusnet are charging less and promising no slowdown. I know you'll tell me "you'd have to ask BT!" but it's a valid thought

One thought - and I have no idea about its validity - is that they have so many customers on the dead cheap Value package who don't use anything like their full allowance that they can

In reply to a post by Oldjim:

One thought - and I have no idea about its validity - is that they have so many customers on the dead cheap Value package who don't use anything like their full allowance that they can

But they aren't contributing much to the purchase of fat pipes, since their subscriptions are dead cheap. BT probably has a fair few low usage customers on their 10GB package too (and paying more than those on Plusnet).

I agree - but then I wonder just how much of the BT charges are down to bloated overheads and little things like an expensive (relatively) router and free wifi etc

I quit Sky for PlusNet today.

1) The engineer rang me at 10:30 not between 1-6 as offered, to see if he could come early. I said he could

2) The install went like a dream - the engineer was a pleasant experienced and helpful BT guy who knew what he was doing

3) My speeds have gone up from the poor ones I was getting from SKY to around 60 Mb/s

So far, I'm getting very consistent stats from speed testers, compared to the wild variations a Sky Fibre connection was giving me.

Couldn't be happier.

Edited by deleted (Fri 25-Jan-13 15:00:54)

Excellent

You know where to come if you need help!

You'll have to ask BT!

(Sorry, I just had to )

I'm not surprised I'm having to explain ourselves a lot. Quite a few editorials have just plain out assumed we are throttling. We've had to drop lines to 5-6 now explaining that they need to update them.

Its possible BT dont even need to throttle but do so as a detterent to keep p2p customers of their network. eg. I find it very hard to believe p2p upload needs to be throttled to 1mbit/sec 24/7 which is what BT do.

I agree to a point tho, BT charge more but also throttle p2p heavily. However if you look at a average plusnet fttc graph, it shows increased latency during evenings, something is getting heavily loaded during that time, and a typical BT graph doesnt do that,

I think the answer is plusnet is been used as a loss leader to mop up customers not attracted to BT. Or the answer might turn out to be as batboy suggested in future the upgrades dont happen and plusnet are in emergency every night.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 25-Jan-13 16:56:28)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

I agree to a point tho, BT charge more but also throttle p2p heavily. However if you look at a average plusnet fttc graph, it shows increased latency during evenings, something is getting heavily loaded during that time, and a typical BT graph doesnt do that,

You got a link showing that I can see?

I suspect he's referring to http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/ where a lot of the graphs show increased evening latency.

A lot of the latency on there is just people using their connections. I've seen it on most of the graphs I've seen (but I have seen a lot of PN graphs so could be biased there! )

I'm obviously excluding the peak time spike we'd have recently on some of those. THat is a hardware problem which we are fixing.

I'm asking though because I 'd like to see the comparisons if we aren't performing favourably and see what we can do about it!

Edited by deleted (Fri 25-Jan-13 18:00:39)

You'll be pleased to know, based on what this thread has told me - that I've joined Plusnet on the unlimited fibre package + phone.

I'm praying to the telephony god 'BeeTee' that it all goes through as simple/hassle free as possible.

also this http://www.craigswebsites.co.uk/ping/

scroll down to PlusNet Fibre Graphs

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 25-Jan-13 18:04:31)

I think he's more likely thinking of this set.

Edit - I see Chrysalis has just posted the same link. It's a useful comparison of multiple suppliers.

My graph shows an increase in latency beween around 8 and 10.

Live graph here
Yesterday's graph here

It's been like this from Jan 9th onwards. Jan 8th was the day that Plusnet had some routing issues between 12:00 and 14:00 and then I had a strange increase in latency around 20:00 to 22:30 (when I rebooted my router). This latency issue was also shown on another users ADSL monitor and reported on community.plus.net

Graph for Jan 7th here

I'm currently on ptn-ag02 but I was on pcl-ag02 after the reboot on the 8th - Not sure when I moved again.

Hope this helps?

Edited by ferretuk (Fri 25-Jan-13 18:13:21)

No MAC on LLU MPF, I got around that by relying on Sky submitting the order correctly which triggered openreach to tell TalkTalk about the move and they wrote to me as expected.

In reply to a post by ferretuk:

My graph shows an increase in latency beween around 8 and 10.

Live graph here
Yesterday's graph here

A lot of the times when I've enquired about the little peak time lift in maximum ping, it's usually correlated with people doing stuff. Chris's one, for example: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/7fdfad64e8f... is usually pretty clear during the day and then has a jump whenever he's downloading games from Steam. I've verified via questioning over Steam as it happens

I can't say that's the same for all the peaks, but a lot of the time I've talked to people, they've been doing something substantial and that's when you see the ping lift. I'm thinking their routers are busy shifting bits, rather than responding immediately to pings. (They tend to worry about routing first as I understand it)

Obviously, if your exchange is congested, or our equipment is congested, you'd see something similar though!

It's been like this from Jan 9th onwards. Jan 8th was the day that Plusnet had some routing issues between 12:00 and 14:00 and then I had a strange increase in latency around 20:00 to 22:30 (when I rebooted my router). This latency issue was also shown on another users ADSL monitor and reported on community.plus.net

Right, so your graph on the 9th is VERY interesting. The huge spike at the end of the day looks like the problem I mentioned above where we have a piece of kit misbehaving. Now, the first time I saw that was on the 13th, so it's really interesting that you've seen something like it before then. Totally missed that. The messy bit earlier than that, I'm not sure about. I'll check our maintenance reports and see if BT were up to something, or i we wer doing something on Monday.

I'm currently on ptn-ag02 but I was on pcl-ag02 after the reboot on the 8th - Not sure when I moved again.

Hope this helps?

I'll be able to check that when I'm back in the office (or if I get motivated enough to get our from under this pizza and get my VPN fob...)

Oh, can we get your graph added to our page? http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs

Edited by deleted (Fri 25-Jan-13 19:15:41)

Can't say that my connection is particularly busy between 8 and 10 - Just browsing mainly. Daughter occasionally watches some iPlayer on her iPod, but not every night. No big downloading and no P2P going on...

I mentioned the problem on the 8th here and I was surprised that an ADSL user had an identical 'blip' (see post 23). The 8th was the day you had some routing issue (your ref 74057)

Feel free to add my graph - I was holding off until after my upgrade to Unlimited on Feb 2nd, just in case my static IP changes

Hah. I obviously did see it because I replied. I'd forgotten.

A few weeks back I was getting inexplicable (to me) latency bumps for a few hours in the evening. I think there was some discussion on tbb or Community forums. Then it stopped.

Now it has come back, a bit before my graph was added to your page. Yesterday's >> today's for instance is showing 8pm-10pm, though not as bad as it often is. No computers in the house were on, and we were out.

Looks like i'm about to jump ship and ove from sky LLU to plus net fibre and phone.

Wish me luck with the switch

There's a few done it. It seems to be OK from Sky. From TalkTalk can be dodgy.

Let us know how you get on.