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[UncleUB]

  Value starts at £5.99 but thats only only market 1 3 exchanges - its £11.99 for a market 1 or 2 exchange,

Sorry to jump this thread but I was under the impression that if your exchange was market 3 you qualified for paying £5.99 a month.My exchange is Attercliffe and is market 3.
I contacted PlusNet and told them this,they then replied saying I qualified for the £5.99 a month for the full 18 months,not just the first 3 months introductory period.

Edit. I have just found this on the PN site.

Plusnet Value

We've designed Plusnet Value as a basic package, for basic Internet activities such as web browsing and email.
Telephone exchange area    Cost for first 3 months    Cost after this
Market 1 or Market 2    £5.99    £11.99
Market 3    £5.99    £5.99

[edited by kitz to correct my error and to avoid future confusion]

[kitz]

>>> Sorry to jump this thread but I was under the impression that if your exchange was market

Sorry UB... that was my fault.
The price I quoted GOM was right for his market 1 exchange...  I just had a brain fart and muxed up the figures later on.   

[UncleUB]

>>> Sorry to jump this thread but I was under the impression that if your exchange was market

Sorry UB... that was my fault.
The price I quoted GOM was right for his market 1 exchange...  I just had a brain fart and muxed up the figures later on.   

No problem,

Just thought I'd double check.

[kitz]

Thanks for pointing it out UB - Good spot - in fact I'm glad that you did bring it up.

Ive edited to avoid further confusion in the future..

[UncleUB]

I know there has been a few comments on this thread about PN support,but as I am in a market 3 exchange it does make it a very good price.
As I have said before when you put it together with the line rental,free eve/w/end calls all for £15.74 it does seem a good deal(apart from the 18 month contract),still I have got use to that with BT. lol

[waltergmw]

Hi UB,

I have a slightly different take on such matters, particularly as out in the sticks we confidently expect difficulties.
All these deals are absolutely splendid until such time as things go wrong; at that point not only are you having to move hell on earth but you possibly can't escape unless you're prepared to pay the extra termination fees to them that you would have already done to a more reliable ISP.

Kind regards,
Walter

[grumpy old man]

I seem to have started a bit of a debate here about pros and cons of ISP's.  I do wonder if the problems I have been experiencing are due to Plusnet becoming part of BT and the previous good customer support is descending to the level of BT!

Have just run speed check with thinkbroad band and speedtest.net.  The results are wildly different, thinkbroadband showing 5700 approx for download whereas speedtest are just showing 2000, very odd.

Plusnet have now responded in some detail on tests carried, alot of which I don't really understand apart from the bit that says BT can't find anything wrong with the line.  They now want to send an engineer out to check wiring but want to charge me £160 if it's a fault beyond the master socket!

Kitz I will look at the alternative products you suggest.  Many Thanks, and thanks to everyone else who has read my thread and responded.

gom

[waltergmw]

Hi GOM,

This link might be part of the explanation for differing speed test results, as might other unknown simultaneous internet traffic or possibly even contention.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3902-not-all-speedtesters-up-to-the-job-still.html

Provided you are confident that you have used the test socket on the master socket, or temporarily isolated any star and / or extension wiring, the BT O threat is almost never carried out.
The BT O guys are usually far too busy to want to become involved in such arguments and most are quite genuinely trying to get the best possible connections for their clients from the creaking copper within their allotted 2 hour time slot. I hope you're pleased that your case isn't just being dropped as the line test has passed.

Regarding other ISPs, I expect you will find some have far better fault processing staff and facilities than others as has been reported many times here.
Apart from the sheer frustration, discussing a problem in plain english with a trained troubleshooter, rather than to an automaton reading from a crib sheet, is a most welcome benefit in otherwise quite stressful circumstances.

Kind regards,
Walter

[kitz]

>> thinkbroadband showing 5700 approx for download whereas speedtest are just showing 2000, very odd.


This has been mentioned elsewhere on these forums a couple of times recently and thats that speedtest.net results dont seem to be as good as TBB's.  This seems to be regardless of which ISP you are with.. and I myself have seen more or less half speeds at speedtest net than think broadband results - particularly from their Maidenhead server at certain times of the day/eve.

Since BT are reporting no faults and your sync speeds/line stats are perfectly fine - I dont think BT will find anything further.

As mentioned by walter.. there have been reports that the thinkbroadband speedtester is normally the most accurate..  but sometimes speedtests should be taken with a pinch of salt and used as a guide.

Its one of the reasons why I suggest installing something like Netmeter, then grabbing a file from fuller.zen and then you will see your real throughput speeds.

[grumpy old man]

I have been checking my speeds with tbb over the last couple of weeks and apart from the first couple of days when download was around 1400, speeds have fluctuated between 2200 and 5700 the lower speed only occurring a couple of times.  I don't know if this improvement of connection speed is due to plusnet. 

These speed tests have all been conducted from my laptop but today I carried speed tests from both laptop and desktop with very different results.  Speed on desktop was around 2800 whereas laptop was around 5700.  I have no idea why I should get such a different.  Desktop is connected to router by cable and laptop by wireless.

Any ideas?

gom

[jeffbb]

Hi
Were both tests carried out within a short time frame ??
Regards Jeff

[grumpy old man]

Yes.  I did test on laptop immediately followed by test on desktop.  I did this twice.

gom

[Mick]

Unlike good ol' ethernet cat5e cable, wireless does not run in full duplex mode and therefore it will be theoretically slower.  At a practical level however most results with a strong wireless signal and an average speed ADSL connection are comparable under ideal conditions.

A lot of factors affect speed tests over wireless.  If (on top of the half-duplex impediment) your connection speed is high and the wireless signal is weak, then the speed test result will be adversely affected.  If more than one wireless devices are communicating with the router at the same time you can half the wireless speeds yet again.  With a 100% wireless signal strength you should get comparable results.

To avoid spurious results affected by the wireless capacity I suggest that you take your laptop to the router and use a cat5e patch cable to run the tests, or use your desktop which is supposedly connected to the router with ethernet cable.

As it has been mentioned already most speed test servers give unreliable results.  More so during busy times, when everybody wants to test their speed!  So it may be contention to the speed tester that gives a low speed result than contention on your BT exchange/ISP/Internet.  To obtain reliable results I recommend downloading at off peak hours (early in the morning) a large file (e.g. a Linux ISO) from a UK mirror and unless you have an application on your PC which measures bps, use your router's 5 minutes average downstream rate reported in the stats to see what's happening.  You'll have to wait for 5 minutes to see the 5 minute average of course.

[kitz]

Speed on desktop was around 2800 whereas laptop was around 5700.

That is unusual, normally you would expect a wireless connection to be a tad slower due to the reasons outlined by Mick.


One of the things I would normally do to check realtime speeds I outlined in my post and [http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php?topic=4278.msg109391#msg109391]here

It may also be worthwhile grabbing a copy of NetMeter 1.1.3, and then watching what 'realtime' speed it records when downloading a file from http://fuller.zen.co.uk/test/

Netmeter will show you what speed traffic is really being received to your PC.  It will also show you if there is any other type of traffic activity occuring on your PC through such things as malware which could be "eating your bandwidth" on that machine.

[grumpy old man]

I have, at last, downloaded netmeter.  Tried a couple of times previously but the link you kindly provided didn't work.  Any way done it now.  Have downloaded file from Zen, I assume that I am looking at DL: on bottom of screen which give me KiB/s. On the download tonight it varied from 195 to 225 for the 10mb file.  Will do the same test on desktop and let you know what results I get.

Connection speed continues to fluctuate was getting around 5.7 at weekend but only 2.6 tonight.  Desktop continues to be around half of these speeds achieved on laptop.

gom