Moving from Namesco (NDO) to Plusnet

I already have my MAC and was about to move this evening to Plusnet Pro from NDO (Namesco now) but I've seen the 90 day thread on here and backlog of orders on their status page.

A bit of background (a rant - you can probably skip this big paragraph if you haven't the time):
NDO cheesed me off by basically telling me when the outage happened at the weekend there was nothing they could do (told the day after the event). I was without internet from Saturday ~2pm until Monday 3pm. I was also annoyed that they'd dumped the 24 hour support number (without telling me), which is why I originally chose NDO and pay slightly more for my broadband. IMHO, re-routing a network down a secondary pipe for long term loyal customers (4 years for me) shouldn't have been a problem, after all dial up worked, and other Namesco customers were online. I then had to spend money on local rate dialup and later £15 prepay on broadband using my 3G phone instead because I was losing time to post ebay auctions (and win them), and had to do some crucial online banking. I demanded NDO return one month's credit to cover my costs (£19.99) but they simply said I could claim "some" compensation, more or less refusing, now they are <sarcasm>generously</sarcasm> extending my pay date by one week. So a combination of anger + losing auctions (and auction time) + spending twice for a broadband + a seeming inability to do network management + poor non 24hr customer service drove me to leave.

HOWEVER, NDO have been very civil with me despite my angry rants, and even got my MAC code to me within 2 working days, so there is a glimmer of hope for them (it restored a bit of my confidence).

Now what I want is the kind of service I used to get frm NDO - 24 hr support and real network management and a personal touch. Is Plusnet's 24 hr support that good - their sales people are very good, email within 1 hour this evening and online sales chat?

I'm also somewhat spooked by the 12 month contract although nowadays this looks commonplace. Should I be considering this - especially if they could throttle the broadband (I don't torrent except for the odd linux distro)?

I couldn't quite tell from their status page, but it seems that although broadband went down this weekend for their customers briefly, I think they switched to Plan B and made sure every customer was online by network throttling, as opposed to NDO which left me (and other customers) out in the cold.
Was any customer actually offline for more than a few hours?

If not plusnet (or namesco), who should I be considering?

Edited by brownb2 (Thu 09-Apr-09 00:45:53)

If not plusnet (or namesco), who should I be considering?

What exchange are you on and what is your sync speed (not download speed test speed, but the download connection speed reported by your router)?

Oh and I'm now considering Be Unlimited as an alternative - my parents are with them and had no interruption to their broadband, and Be do 24/7 support.

I'm on FARNWORTH (Bolton). I've had a 2MB (not RADSL IIRC) line for quite a while because I never saw the need to move to a faster but capped package with NDO.

I get:

DownStream Connection Speed 2272 kbps
UpStream Connection Speed 288 kbps

on the router config, which I think it quite good (for 2Mbps). Plusnet's speed advisor thingie put me at potentially 6Mbps

Hmmm. I don't know what PN's business packages are like, but I'm not sure their standard domestic offerings will have the exacting personal standards of support you evidently require.

Now to be fair, I have not had many problems with them over the years, and have, on occasion, received levels of support that I regarded as personal - largely through the medium of this forum. But nevertheless, I wouldn't really expect them to do a custom workaround, just for me, in the event of an outage. Not at the prices I am paying, anyway.

Outages have been pretty rare (I don't think I've ever had one lasting more than a couple of hours), but they DO happen: 24x7 availability is not guaranteed.

If your connection is that critical to you, I think you might either have to pay a lot more for a guaranteed service (don't know if anyone even offers this), organise a reserve means of connecting, or take out some form of insurance to protect you.

I don't like the new, long "lock-ins", either. I am on a legacy product, so not subject to them at the moment. But it does effectively preclude me from switching to another package, still with PN, because they'd take effect then. So if I ever want to change products, my best bet is to leave PN, even though I'm not unhappy with them!

Go figure, as they say...

Right - with it being a fixed speed line, there are better estimators than the BT Database one that Plusnet use.

If you can also find your attenuation then we can use that and get a figure based on how your line is actually performing rather than a usually conservative and sometimes completely wrong database.

If you don't know how to get your attenuation have a look at this site.

It's true, but sad, that if a PN customer wants to change product they are better leaving or get tied in to a 12 month contract (18 months for new customers).

One of the attractions of Pn was it's 1 month contract and 3 months trial period. They thought they had such good products they did not need to tie anyone with contracts.

They obviously do not believe that anymore.

Okay here are my stats, Be thinks I can have up to 10mbps (according to BT's line info):

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 2272 kbps 288 kbps
Line Attenuation 40 db 11 db
Noise Margin 18 db 26 db

I'm not sure many Plusnet forum users wish to know what Be estimate .

But this estimator agrees, although I think its actual download estimate is a bit high.

not all of us have the luxury of LLU, in the meantime PN are the best I've used.