In reply to:
I am also on Plusnet on Premier and find it is good for what I do.
The only advice I would give is during your free trial period make sure you test everything you want to use so you know it fits your needs. Thats what I did during my free trial and all went well so I signed up fully.
Indeed for general usage if you know how many gigs you need per month Plusnet do not seem a bad choice compared to some.
However I will say after just looking at their webpages for the first time in about 6 months i could NOT recommend ANY of their packages to people that regularly want P2P/Binary USENET or TV/Radio/Movie downloads.
Plusnet by their own admission do admit say at peak times the experience for people with that type of use will be quote "Non-interactive experience. Customers will see restricted speeds whenever the network is busy." or in other words and proper English... throttled to death lol
I could not find any Plusnet package where they can say with certainty at peak times those types of service would not be affected when it comes to actual raw speed, not even with a business package or a PAYG package.
This is very strange IMO and very poor when the especially if the customer is paying per gig. It would also if i were a business instantly turn me away because if they want to charge a premium price for business users but not provide 'more' then whats the point?
Whats even stranger is if you look at
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/network/roadmap.shtml They say in 2004 60% (and rising) of traffic was P2P, if you look at that graph carefully you can see that as speeds have got faster people have wanted MORE content from their connections, which makes sense. What doesnt make sense is if Plusnet know what the customer wants most of the time why do they limit it at peak times?
Thats a rhetorical question BTW we all know why really... MONEY!
From looking at their pages and Plusnets honesty here in this forum i would say they could be a good provider if you mainly just browse, email, and maybe game online a bit.
I could not recommend any of their packages if you are a heavy user (and by heavy i mean max your connection download wise more then 3 hours every day, in plusnets eyes with a little quick maths

that would NOT be acceptable and you would find your speed throttled).
Personally I can see why providers do throttle and apply limits, but within a few years that is going to have to change. Throttling at the moment depending on what form is used can kill any connection that just wants to stream a youtube video. If the future is online streaming HDTV like content then stupid throttle controls and silly under 100gig caps IMO is not the way forward, of course thats just my opinion.
I also believe if you do nothing but just browse web pages on the internet and send email like some broadband suppliers would like you to do. Then there is NO point in you paying say 15 quid (i use that figure as a rough average) per month for broadband.
If all you are doing is email and browsing, you could probably for the same price or not much more, with little noticed difference in speed do the same thing on a old fashioned PAYG dial up connection without worry of any type of contract or any type of download limit or peak/off peak time rubbish (of course you still have to pay per minute, but if you only browse and email your actual time online per month probably isnt much anyway). Thats just my opinion.
Edited by deleted (Sat 07-Apr-07 19:57:26)