Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => ISPs => Topic started by: bob.gas on October 15, 2016, 02:44:44 PM
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Probably too late to ask this question now :-[
But I have just signed up to Plusnet (not set-up yet).
Just wondering if any of you guys have it already, and are you happy with them?
Also what's their customer service like?
Edit...
Sorry folks, looking through my posts, I see I've already had some responses from some of you about Plusnet, when I inquired about an ISP
That's the trouble with getting old
but any future replies on the subject will be most welcomed. ;)
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Great when it works - just hope you don't have any issues, the support isn't a patch on what it used to be!
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We just switched to Plusnet yesterday and so far its been really good! Especially for the price compared to BT.
Today the Hub One rebooted but it was good because it updated its firmware to the latest 4.7.5.1.83.8.226 :D
Before with BT with a BT "Smart" Hub I was getting 24ms ping, 60Mbs download and 15Mbs upload.
With Plusnet and the Hub One I am now getting 6ms ping, 65Mbs download and 19Mbs upload ;D My line was probably reset and I was took off any interleaving the Smart Hub caused but also now I have matching chipsets Hub One with ECI cabinet.
Also something I tested earlier on was Plusnets "Prioritisation". Normally with BT when I download a large file / game or uploaded something it would lag when I am in a Skype call, now with Plusnet it does not.
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I started using PLusNet on my "other" connection 2 months ago and I have been satisfied with the connection speed in general and the price is relatively good. The customer service, on the other hand, has in my limited experience been awful - they take ages to respond to any tickets raised and good luck trying to get anyone on the phone, the last time I called them I was advised that the queue was 45 minutes.
If I was starting again I would pay more and go elsewhere, this experience has re-affirmed the importance of being prepared to pay for responsive customer service. I also have a Zen connection - they always answer the phone, I rarely have to wait very long and their staff are knowledgeable and friendly and usually resolve any issue relatively quickly.
If I have any serious technical issues with PlusNet I doubt it will be resolved quickly, fortunately for me as I have 2 connections this wouldn't result in a total outage however if I only had a single connection I definitely wouldn't use PLusNet based on my experience so far.
Chunks
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There are a lot of Plusnet users on this forum, our leader included, so they must be doing something right. :)
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As the financial ads say, "past performance is no guide...". but I was introduced several years ago by by my son-i-l. He and my daughter use it quite heavily for their employments, and have 2 sons with own laptops. My bro-i-l is a user refugee from TT, and my son's a user too.
Lastly the large church I attend has it too.
From all those I have heard no serious complaints.
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I'm a long term user of PN having joined in 2003, yes they could do a lot of things better, but overall I'm happy with the broadband service and price. I haven't had need to use CS for a long time though. We also have a business connection with them at work.
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Been with them just over 12 months and have no complaints. I use my own hardware (Draytek Modem and ASUS Router) and the connection is rock solid. We are fairly heavy users (downloads in the region of 1 to 2TB per month) and get consistent speeds at any time of day.
Never needed CS so can't comment.
Hope it goes well for you.
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Connection & speeds are fine, no probs there.
Support not so good atm - had to take something to the forum as my ticket appeared to get lost in the system, so started looking at other ISPs with 100% intention of migrating.
I am in limbo atm though as got a phone call last week. I noticed that a couple of others on the forum had a similar problem as me with their billing during the Aug/Sep period. It's been escalated and the others refunded. I'm being guinea pig to see if it rights automatically this month without manual intervention. Had a long convo about current waiting times which will definitely be fed to higher beings. Judging my an email on Fri it looks like it has.. so we shall see.
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Ticket raised Tuesday 20 Sep 2016 about sporadic issues with VoIP that I thought was either traffic management or congestion.
They initially treated it as a connection fault and came back telling me as the connection had been up solid for 25 days with no drop (my initial report said my connection was solid). In fact they are still relying on the radius log - there's an issue with my central heating and I usually get a loss of sync around 12:30 pm every day. God knows how many times to has been pointed out to them that the radius log does not give the full picture!
On 12th October I finally see at the end of a test report
Summary - Potential issue with VLAN utilisation, will raise.
and on 14th
As per our conversation, I have been in touch with Openreach who have advised of a capacity issue at the local exchange. This essentially means the equipment cannot handle the amount of traffic, so BT are looking into either spreading the load across existing equipment or installing extra.
The current expected completed date of this work is 15/10/16.
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Reporting higher will, from previous experience, have no effect whatsoever
Support whether by tickets (now effectively dead), chat or phone is abysmal and don't even think about faults as there is presently a 5 - Yes Five - day wait for a reported fault to be picked up which is extremely annoying when the fault is loss of broadband
Despite having a stable connection and a nice deal I am seriously considering moving when the deal runs out as I don't have a sensible alternative (lousy mobile signal). They have about 14 months to show some significant improvement
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Interesting!!
Thanks for all your input guys :)
Some good, some not so good.
ironically, one of the reasons I decided to join PN, was because I'd read their customer service is good, I must have read OLD reviews.
Hopefully I won't need to call them :fingers:
Apart from "dambuilder", do you all use the PN router or not?
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I'd read their customer service is good, I must have read OLD reviews.
They were - they even won awards for it a few years back. Something appears to have gone wrong recently. :/
It was meant to get better when they opened a new call centre in Leeds, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference, and things have slid and support times increased.
They have supposedly just taken on a pile of new staff.. but the problem with that is it takes time to train them and increases the likely-hood of getting a numpty type reply.
The likes of Jelv, Jim and myself have been with them practically since they started doing adsl (although I went to Be* for a few years for something called Annex_m), so we remember the days were once upon a time most of their support staff were extremely knowledgeable and on a par with the likes of Zen so we notice the difference. At the end of the day, I guess you gets what you pays for.
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I was with them before ADSL (on Connect dial-up) - I joined 6 Nov 2001.
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....
Apart from "dambuilder", do you all use the PN router or not?
No, FWLIW.
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Apart from "dambuilder", do you all use the PN router or not?
Not me, I use all my own gear
Chunks
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The service depends so much on the distance you are from the fibre cabinet and the number of subscribers being fed from it. We live in the country less than 100m from the cabinet and I have not been impacted by crosstalk at all as far as I can tell. Having been with plusnet since about 2004 I can remember the excellent customer service but a recent problem confirmed how very poor it has become. I shan't move from them just now as because of my favoured location all I would be looking for is better CS and hopefully I can fix or at least understand local problems and I would not get better speed from anyone else.
Tony
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With respect to speed and congestion there are no problems with Plusnet but there have been three cases I am aware of (one was me) where the sync to the fibre cab was solid but it wouldn't authenticate
It took nearly a week to sort out and it was something a Plusnet's end as it was eventually fixed without an engineer visit although they never said what they did to fix it
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Latest gem from Plusnet: if you upload at full speed and start getting disconnects it's your fault for working the line too hard.
https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/Plusnet-fibre-broadband-does-not-cope-with-uploads-and-will/td-p/1377361
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I use my own hardware both at home and at work
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Could be a fault with the EU's hardware, I know from personal experience that my router will crash if i don't limit the number of connections to it when downloading a fast torrent, failing EU failure it's something to do with the ISP's config, if it keeps losing PPPoE session
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Three of us in my office are/were with Plusnet. I shifted early, 9 months into contract, after getting fed up with support issues. One guy is just changing provider now after they switched him without any alternative from 40/20 to 52/10, thus halving his upload speed. Third guy was seriously miffed with the 40/2 service, which he felt had been mis-sold, but is going to put up with them until end of contract before shifting.
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Apart from "dambuilder", do you all use the PN router or not?
I use my own router, but for basic use.. the supplied router should be fine.
I dont know if bob is into things like looking at line stats etc :)
Latest gem from Plusnet: if you upload at full speed and start getting disconnects it's your fault for working the line too hard
Hmmm. looks like the modem to me.
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well, I'm "hooked" (as they call it ::)).
Up and running.... OK so far.
Running @ 17.18mbps download and only 1.86mbps upload ???. Does that seem correct/normal?
Thanks for all the reply's by the way. :)
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I read a BT Wholesale document recently that talked about PPP sessions being dropped if an ISP has a link to BT that uses incorrectly configured kit at the endpoint of iirc an L2TP connection and the link is completely maxed out with traffic. The problem occurred if QoS, queue management and prioritisation of control traffic was not being done properly. (There was also a warning about not running such links at over 90% utilisation.) So there is a known problem with PPP failure, heavy load and some ISPs’ kit, although a single user is not going to cause it as the links in question are those between the ISP and BT at the end nearest to the ISP not near the EU. The whole ISP would have to be congested in one directions already, so all things considered this doesn't seem to really fit.
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well, I'm "hooked" (as they call it ::)).
Up and running.... OK so far.
Running @ 17.18mbps download and only 1.86mbps upload ???. Does that seem correct/normal?
Thanks for all the reply's by the way. :)
All depends on distance, quality of line, crosstalk, what product your on etc.
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I'm uncertain but is the basic Plusnet G.993.2 service provided as 40/2 Mbps DS/US? :-\ If yes, then the US looks about right.
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Yes, for the last year or so they've only offered new users (or existing ADSL users upgrading) 40/2 or 80/20.
Along with this is the madness that if your predicted speed is below 40 they refuse to sell you 80/20 even if you are willing to pay the extra to get faster uploads.
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Yes, for the last year or so they've only offered new users (or existing ADSL users upgrading) 40/2 or 80/20.
Thanks for the confirmation.
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Would think that was a good thing no point in spending extra cash for a service you won't be able to make use of and 80/20 on my line would be a good example of unusable
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Not really, we get 36/6 at work, and we need the 6 upload not 2. I suspect the same applies for many people. Plusnet really should offer 40/2, 40/10, 55/10 and 80/20.
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Plusnet really should offer 40/2, 40/10, 55/10 and 80/20.
Or, at least, 40/2, 55/10 and 80/20.
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Its a mass market decision I expect, someone has probably crunched the numbers and decided that more people just want as cheap as possible up to 40mbit vs the people bothered about having more than 2mbit upload. I consider plusnet a mass market isp now.
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definitely don't like that 40/2 if a line is able to receive a download of 30 to 38Mbps the upload should be able to send 4 to 8Mbps
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>>> decided that more people just want as cheap as possible up to 40mb
I notice that TalkTalk has undergone some changes this week. - New logo, new site, new "TalkTalk for Everyone"...... and withdrawn 80/20.
Their 2 products are now named:
- 'Fast
er Broadband' (adsl2+)
- 'Faster Fibre Broadband' (40/2)
which to me is pushing descriptive license.
They are also claiming to be the first ISP to offer all-in-one pricing that includes both line rental and broadband rather than separate pricing. Again not quite true - SSE & vodafone on their fibre products.
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Edit typo
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Well yeah, faster than what? to call something faster there should be something slower to choose.
I see you either typod or they fixed the site.
The adsl package is now called fast (not faster) broadband.
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typo by me - corrected.
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I'm uncertain but is the basic Plusnet G.993.2 service provided as 40/2 Mbps DS/US? :-\ If yes, then the US looks about right.
:-[ Excuse my ignorance, but by 40/2 I assume that's 40 Mbps download and 2 upload..right?
[Moderator edited to correct a typo.]
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Again not quite true
Since when has such a trivial matter as facts stopped TalkTalk creating good advertising copy?
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How do BT and PN prices (the real ones, not new customer offers) fit together for the various service levels? The reason for my question is that I wonder if it could be a way to lessen the attractiveness of PN's lower level offer, so making customers consider BT instead, were any cost uplift not too severe.
Other matters like the drop in service standards too, could they be part of an effort to merge PN completely with BT? Of course in doing that, they carry the risk that the group will lose clients to other ISPs. Some will have moved anyhow, but provided the risk-reward looks good, why not?
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:-[ Excuse my ignorance, but by 40/2 I assume that's 40 Mbps download and 2 upload..right?
Yes. :)
DS = Downstream and US = Upstream, from the viewpoint of the end-user.