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[les-70]

 I was wondering on a move to Plusnet and a year ago I would have thought this safe enough.  However I have noticed various concerns in recent months of things not being what they were.  I wondered if Plusnet folk to could give an update on whether or not Plusnet is back to an acceptable state? 

 I am aiming to change from TalkTalk Business FTTC to another FTTC but not business. My reasons for this are wishing to be on a "fast" rather than "stable" FTTC profile and increasing concerns over evening congestion.  I had similar congestion about 6 month ago and after a month or so it was fixed. Now 6 months later it is back but in a different flavour.  Previously the symptoms were long pings and no packet loss with slow speeds but this time the pings are totally stable but packet loss comes with the low speeds.

   
An alternative choice for me at a greater cost would be ZEN.  AAISP are simply to troublesome to migrate to if your starting with a full LLU.  As far as I can gather from talking to AAISP if your on full LLU you can't avoid a full cease and week or two later reprovision if you wish to retain telephone service on your existing number.  It is pity they don't have a land line telephone service option so they could make the switch relatively seamlessly.  Also as far as I can tell when available AAISP also use the TTB backhaul for FTTC  so depending on their arrangements I might not escape the congestion with them.

[kitz]

Current speed test which is possibly slower than normal due to me having an MTU of 400 [long story - vodafone & need to reboot the PC]



My latency is excellent and never, ever much varies from 14ms to the BBC.   Obviously latency depends on where you are and the DLM, but I can honestly say this isnt something which has ever caused any concern.

I think a lot of the complaints last year were due to congestion on the BTw shared MSILs and Plusnet not being open about the cause.
Support isnt what it used to be, but the past couple of times I have contacted them they have been ok..  in fact the last time I did ring about someone elses line a couple of weeks ago, the call was picked up straight away and surprisingly no queue.   Obviously its not like that all the time though.

I have noticed various concerns in recent months of things not being what they were.

Once upon a time their CS was similar to Zen and support staff knew what they were talking about.    As they have grown the inevitable has happened and you get a lot more of the script monkey type responses. :/   They also arent quite as open about things as they used to be, but are still a bit more transparent than the likes of BTr/TT/Sky.

 

[les-70]

 @kitz Thanks for the update it does not sound too bad and your speed tests always seem very encouraging.  However as you say it is exchange dependent.  TalkTalk Business support is a mixture - fast telephone response and technically competent people but after that you quickly find that they are sitting with very limited capabilities via their terminals and issues often seem to have to go into higher levels that don't respond quickly and you can't ever speak to directly. 

[adrianw]

I am with Plusnet Business, and have been since I managed to escape from BT Business (just say no, they make BT Retail look good).

I recently switched from ADSL to FTTC. Mine was the first order for the cabinet and it all went horribly wrong, somewhere in BTOR or BTW with the order stuck and uncancellable, blocking resubmission, then the misfortune of an incompetent and workshy Kelly engineer turning up. Installation actually performed by a competent BT OR man.

After I raised a "what happened to my migration?" ticket, Plusnet beat up BT* and kept me informed through the weeks it took. Mainly through the ticket and emails.

Sync rates on my  short (100 metre) line are good, speed tests and real world use in line with that.

Bearing in mind that they are now a mass market supplier, I am still happy with them.

[ejs]

Even at the best of times, the fastest FTTC lines do seem to lose about 1 or 2 Mb of throughput speed due to the effect of the Plusnet profile (e.g. here or here). In a way, it doesn't really matter if someone gets 74 Mb instead of 76 Mb, but in another way, it seems like Plusnet get away with knocking off a little speed off every customer, multiplied by hundreds of thousands of customers, it'll be saving them money on bandwidth costs.

[Bald_Eagle1]

I have been with PlusNet for many years & Force 9 / Free-Online previously when they used those trading names.

The only other ISP that I think would have stuck with me to finally resolve my intermittent external line fault a few years ago would have been AAISP, but their high monthly costs never really appealed to me.

More recently though were the denial issues around the congestion matter (but that didn't really affect my lower speed connection) & their change back to only 2 Mbps upstream on the cheapest FTTC package.
Again, as an existing customer, I remain on a legacy product that allows up to 20 Mbps US although my connection can actually only achieve around 4.5 Mbps due to its 1100m length.

Things do seem to have gone downhill a bit over the last couple of years.
Although I haven't needed to use it for a long time, I have read numerous times that PlusNet's technical support (at one time one of their strongest points) is now quite poor - script reading support staff etc.

If I wasn't an existing customer, I'd now probably also look at other ISPs quite closely, with PlusNet a lot lower down the list.

[jelv]

I too couldn't recommend Plusnet at the moment. When it works it's great but if you get problems raising the issue is a lot harder than it used to be, you will probably wait a lot longer for them to take action when you have raised it, their monitoring of the responses from OR/BTw sometimes breaks down, some issues slip through cracks and only get picked up when the user chases them, the standard of the support reps sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. A lot of issues we see are when people migrate in and upgrade to FTTC.

In short, if being off-line for some days in the event of a problem while they get their act together would cause you grief and you think it's too much of a risk, look elsewhere.

[les-70]

  Thanks for the comments they are leaning me a bit towards ZEN but I suspect that if nothing goes wrong Plusnet would be fine, the choice would be less risky if contract lengths were shorter.  Connection wise things have only gone wrong for me about every 3 years.  Always due to wires pushed about in the very full cab. 

Zen reviews are generally more positive but apart from prompt customer response I wonder if the actual service is detectably different if your exchange does does not have one of their LLU's.

[Weaver]

>some days in the event of a problem while they get their act together would cause you grief and you think it's too much of a risk, look elsewhere.

Let someone else say it for me. 

And btw, you might really need BTW "Enhanced Care" and multiple lines. During the last month I had show-stopping faults on two out of my three ADSL lines, though luckily not on two simultaneously. The third line, which ironically had Enhanced Care, stayed up the whole time without a blip. Anyway, I hurriedly bought Enhanced Care on one of the problem lines. Considering it takes one mouse click to enable it (seriously guys), it seemed to take its time taking any effect, and I got the feeling, perhaps unfairly, that an artificial delay was in there to prevent people from saying to themselves, "well, I'll just order it if I need it".

I don't think Enhanced Care is good enough as it is, not really powerful enough, and I would also like to see a Turbo version. Nevertheless for some people it's probably an essential now.

[les-70]

  A short loss of service does not worry me these days.  Mobile is only 3G here but that is enough to get me by for the odd week.  All that would cause me real grief are potential major frustrations in getting an issue taken up. 

[aesmith]

The problem with Plusnet is their support.  Long hold times sometimes exceeding an hour if you phone in (and annoying "music"),  a dysfunctional online fault logging system which sort of has to be tricked into raising a ticket,  then your ticket can be sat on for days on end.  Once the fault's being actioned it seems that different people pick it up, and are likely to go off at a tangent because the haven't read the history properly.    All these mean that anything but a trivial fault is likely to me strung out over a ridiculous time period.

I don't think it's going to improve, instead of fixing the proper support service their efforts appear to be spread out thinly by inviting people to log faults on Facebook or Twitter (of all things!). 

[Weaver]

Well, you do know where you can find what you need.

[les-70]

   If you read the first post you will see that AAISP have a very troublesome migration route for LLU folk who want their landline phone and number. It is probably the equivalent of the very worst migration case with e.g. Plusnet.  It means a definite 10 days of no service and the risk of the FTTC lines becoming unavailable in that interval.

[Weaver]

Apologies Les, I hadn't read that. Mea maxima culpa. It is a nuisance about the FTTC migration route. What about ordering a second FTTC line and then doing a cease on the first line if you no longer need it?

[Weaver]

What about talking to RevK, to see if he can help think up anything intelligent? (@TheRealRevK)