Ready to leaves Plusnet Fibre for ............?

We have alternated Plusnet & BT since we got fibre. Both have given us good service except when they dislodged/broke a cable in the green street box. It took them a week to get a service engineer out to reconnect it. My contract with Plusnet is about to end. I use the supplied modem/router which does not impress me much and which, I understand, can only be used with BT owned providers. I find changing suppliers of electricity, internet etc a real pain.

We use the internet for browsing, catch up Tv etc but no gaming and find our 36Mb plan adequate. We tried 72Mb and it didn't make any obvious difference.

We have Anytime calls as we do not use mobiles - yes there really are some of us left!

I live in an area that does not have FTTP nor any possibility of getting it anytime soon. We do not have any cable service.

The exchange is obviously fibre enabled and has Sky and TalkTalk (CPW) LLU's.

I have looked at remaining with BT, Plusnet, EE and they all have a clause about price rises being 3.9% + CPI which means 4.75%+. This would happen twice in the 18 month contract (June 2021 and March 2022).

Allowing for the price increases due on the BT owned services the likes of Zen and Pulse8 look much more reasonable than they did and I am attracted to the fixed price Zen commitment. I have read good reports about both of them. I am basically neutral on the call costs between Zen & Pulse8.

The questions:

1. Zen or Pulse8?

2. Are there any other providers that I should consider?

3. Is the FRITZ!Box 7530 a good idea? I note that it does not have wireless ax which my new laptop does have.

4. If I go with Pulse8 please suggest a good solid simple modem router that isn't any more expensive than it need to be ?

5. Do any of the suggested providers make changing provider at a future date more complicated?

Providers that use Openreach's infrastructure typically give the same speed (there are some exceptions, as some providers use different DLM profiles/backhauls but generally the speed is similar between providers). The main two things that differentiate providers are price and the quality of their customer service.

To try and answer your questions...

1) I haven't used Zen or Pulse8, but I haven't heard bad things about them.

2) I'm with BT, their customer service isn't always great, but they have provided us a fast and stable service on FTTC/VDSL (obviously this is down to the line quality/interference not the ISP). They aren't cheap, but they do offer some good TV packages.

3) I have heard that FRITZ!Box's are good, but I haven't used one myself.

4) Try the router they supply, then see if you require anything better.

5) I shouldn't think so.

Edited by Grimers (Sat 03-Apr-21 19:55:45)

Thanks for the reply.

The reason for the router question is that Pulse8, as far as I know, don't supply any electronics.

The Billion range is pretty good, do you know what cabinet type you are connected to?

I have used various ISPs that are on the BT network and found the best by far to be idnet,I know that on the same network most ISPs should provide the same speed in theory but moving from plusnet to idnet proved to me that isn't the case,there are factors other than which networks the service uses:- throughput and connection speed aren't the same and some providers traffic shape(they tend to deny this!)at busy times

In reply to a post by Grimers:

The Billion range is pretty good, do you know what cabinet type you are connected to?

It is a Huwai of some sort.

Plusnet admits that they traffic shape, but I know that Zen does not. I am not sure whether Pulse8 do or not.

Ok, then go for a CPE (router) with a Broadcom chipset in it and you should be good to go!

I've been with Zen for years and have always been very happy with them. As for the Fritzbox, I wouldn't worry about the lack of ax. It might connect your laptop to the router faster than ac (if you're close enough, no walls between and so forth) but then you're out to the internet at 30 odd Mbps so that dash to/from the router is all a bit wasted. Unless you're connecting to some other local device on a home network the extra speed won't be of any use to you.

John

Hi Chris -- we're in a similar situation only we're probably older! We don't game or do much streaming so PN's 36MB package, anytime calls, do all we need with total reliability though PN's accounting system remains a nightmare. If you do move you can be sure of plenty of aggro.

Anything outside your master socket is the responsibility of Openreach supposedly now independent of BT. So cable faults will still torture you whatever your ISP.

Costs: I've had a look around and PN is still great value despite the oncoming increases. I would research costings very carefully before I moved if I were you.

As to router, we have no interest or inclination towards tech or fancy features, agree the PN Hub One is far from great but scores of PN users have bought a second-hand HH6 for around £15, used the excellent setup guide on the PN community forum and are enjoying very good results. Good luck whatever you choose.