Sky or Plusnet?

Hi All,

I need to decide who to go with out of Sky and Plusnet.

My bro-in-law has had Sky for a mnth (prev NTL). He says it's been fine and has had no problems with equipment and connection. He actually says that the day he plugged in the Sky router his speeds actually increased. He downloads at all times of the day and so far is going ok. I know Sky are massive but not ISP experts but will their money buy them the things req'd to deliver a great Bband service?

A friend has Plusnet. He has been with them for just over a year now and he says that initially there were some probs with speeds etc but now that seems to have been resolved although sometimes speed in the day is a little slow. He dnlds mainly in the off-peak hrs 12am-4pm as stated by plusnet and is satisfied with his ISP. He also mentioned changes that are due that should improve things as well as BT buying Plusnet so there being the ISP experience and weight behind them.

I will be downloading approx 45-65gb a month, mainly peer-peer, and am wary of being tied into a yr deal and then finding i hate it! I have read both pluses and negs about Sky, the pluses being obv price

If you check out the dedicated forums for Sky and Plusnet it may help you to make a decision.

If you do 65Gig or more a month then go with Sky IMO

Hi B, as an ex PlusNet customer I can assure you PlusNet do not have strong customer service; the phone is huge wait times; the ticket system is overloaded and speeds are very poor at all times, but more importantly general quality of connection is low.

Sky FUP

we could have answered this question reading the title alone.

Sky.

Right then, where to start...

After reading some of the replies, I'd best start with some history...

Where we were...
Last year, our service was far from superb. Customer Support wait times were unreasonable, platform stability was unacceptable and we failed to keep up with demands for bandwidth. We took our eyes of the ball and I'm quite happy to admit that. We had a number of problems caused by badly handled implementations of 8Mb speed upgrades, LLU migrations, E-Mail platform migration etc... and it nearly killed us.

Where we are now...
Right now, however, we're in a much better place. This is a trend, I believe, that's set to continue. We're rolling out improvements left right and centre and things are only set to get better. In the last few months alone we've :-

Customer Support
- Reduced average wait time on the phones to less than 3 minutes
- Call answer rate best it has ever been around 75-80%
- Introduced dedicated support for Business customers (yesterday average wait was 16seconds)
- 60% 'First-Time-Fix' rate on customer tickets
- Reintroduced 'real-time' customer support statistics at http://csc.plus.net

Platform
- Invested in more central capacity, with further capacity on order ready for growth (we *won't* take our eyes of this ball again!)
- Purchased a

Edited by deleted (Wed 04-Apr-07 14:53:50)

Cool.

Have to say i'm impressed and I think this is what my friend was referring to when he said things had improved at PN. They actually talk to the people and sound like they know what they r saying. Then again they could say anything and I prob wouldn't know if it was right or wrong!

My major worry with Sky is it filling it's books with customers but not being able to deliver. Also on other forums I have seen some Sky users stating they r downloading 100's of gigs, surely they will kill the experience for others?

I also wonder what speeds I would get via either. PN do up to 8mb and Sky up to 16mb. I live just a touch over 2 miles from the exchange which is LLU enabled.

I have signed for a mnth to PN on a freebie and in the meantime will keep an eye on goings on at Sky. Having looked at both ISP's forums on this site there is a mix of people. Sky have happy customers and downright annoyed ones! PN have happy and unhappy although a lot of the unhappy, if not all, are ex-customers and not current. It would be nice to have feeedback off a current customer as well.

One reply mentioned no. of customers on each ISP, that Sky had more than PN. Would less not mean better sharing of bandwidth or is that a total misunderstanding of the technology?

Thanks for your replies, and that in just a day! Please give any more advice/opinions throughout the month and I will post back when i have made a final decision at the end of this offer.

Could i just ask the Plusnet ISP Rep. what advantages would there be for a user needing and i quote from the original post "I will be downloading approx 45-65gb a month, mainly peer-peer". Are things about to change at Plusnet that suddenly 65gig of P2P traffic a month would be ok?
I only ask as if this is the case your company could well be a very important and good choice in the FUTURE for some looking for a new provider through these forums.

Edited by deleted (Wed 04-Apr-07 18:43:14)

If you aren't too keen on the 12 month Sky contract take a look at UKFSN (Entanet).

Could i just ask the Plusnet ISP Rep. what advantages would there be for a user needing and i quote from the original post "I will be downloading approx 45-65gb a month, mainly peer-peer". Are things about to change at Plusnet that suddenly 65gig of P2P traffic a month would be ok?

We focus on offering sustainable products, with set usage allowances which allow us to deliver a decent customer experience. We have lots of customers using plenty more than the giggage the OP is looking at using. But they're not doing it when the network is at is busiest, and they're quite happy with that arrangement where it's also not included in their usage allowances.

The bottom line is that we'll provide the most capacity we possibly can per product. We'll make sure this is carved up fairly and then we'll make sure that the interactive applications are not affected by customers using sustained downloads such as P2P or Usenet. As interactive traffic drops off, P2P and Usenet can have all the more bandwidth on the platform.

If customers want to use lots and lots of P2P in the evening, then they need to be on a PAYG product on which we can allocate more bandwidth as customers are buying it by the GB. We think that's the fairest way - and we're not the only ISP seeing this problem. Others just aren't as open with the customer about how they attempt to manage it.