Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => ISPs => Topic started by: jelv on November 27, 2016, 09:54:49 PM
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As many of you may be aware I recently left Plusnet after 15 years and moved to Andrews & Arnold.
I've just made a very comprehensive post on the Plusnet Community forums explaining why:
https://community.plus.net/t5/Plusnet-Feedback/Why-I-have-left-Plusnet/td-p/1389353
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A very interesting read highlighting a very sad state of affairs. :-\
I suspect that there will be other knowledgeable people doing likewise in the forthcoming months. :-X
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For the curious, I am locked out of plusnet forums, I have the problem that jelv and kitz had initially on their new forum., my password stopped working and the password reset email never arrives. Company seems a mess now days :(
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Great write up Jelv, I've been with PN for just over 13 years, and have added to your thread. Hopefully PN will sort themselves out, but I doubt it.
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And this I fear, is what will happen to EE now they are owned by BT. Overtime BT just seem to suck the innovation out of the businesses they buy.
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>:(
Great write up Jelv, I've been with PN for just over 13 years, and have added to your thread. Hopefully PN will sort themselves out, but I doubt it.
I recently joined PlusNet on my second line and my experience was completely aligned with your write-up (http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,18345.0.html), in general the whole process was painful. The connection itself is OK, I did attempt to speak to customer services twice but gave up both times, I am just not going to wait on the phone for "minimum 45 minutes" to speak to someone.
It's not a bad deal financially especially taking into account the discount they give for line installation but I will be leaving as soon as I am no longer locked in ....
My other line is Zen, I have been with them for many years, had a few minor issues but always quickly resolved and their customer service is excellent ..... well worth the extra few quid tbh
I just hope I don't have any problems requiring customer services with my PN line in the meantime, enjoy your new ISP!
Cheers
Chunks
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Excellent summary jelv. Ive also responded over there.
I'm also going to try pull some figures out from the ISP ratings (http://www.kitz.co.uk/isp/ISP_rating.php), from what I can see, its pretty obvious there has been a drastic decline in CS.
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Good write up jelv.
I've never been with Plusnet. Though I remember when Plusnet was one of the places to go for people who were more advanced users. It's always sad when once leaders of industry start sinking from their own actions, or lack of.
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As mentioned on Jelvs thread on the Plusnet forums, I was interested to see when the rot set in.
Ive pulled out some figures which show when things started to go downhill. Its obviously customer service which is letting them down and affecting the overall totals.
Because of the image size, I didnt want to post it on the PN forum and spam his thread, but I'll post the results here for anyone who is interested.
(https://forum.kitz.co.uk/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kitz.co.uk%2Ftemp%2Fyearlybreakdown.gif&hash=e4d034d31e9df8bcd0dd74bdcaeb330bb4d15ded)
Ive also attached one for TT, just for comparison.
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Customer Services,Speed and other stuff is not a high priority unless your have a home server running away on your ISP in that case you need a Business ISP contract if you want good customer services which may also give you Oprenreach priory then you have to pay more.
Most Home Broadband users I think the priority will be the Monthly cost the cheaper the better well it is for me and if the Broadband goes down for 5 days it won't ruin my week ;)
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5 days having to travel to London at £100+ per day (getting up at 5am and home around 8pm) because I have no internet connection at home would pretty much ruin my week!
Presumably you only insure your car 3rd party and have no home or contents insurance to save money.
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Not quite sure how my kids would do some of their homework, which has to be done on online, other homework has to be uploaded to Google drive as well, I doubt that "sorry miss but the broadband was down" would be acceptable. With the use of mobiles phones and tethering I could probably get by, but I don't work from home, only occasionally needing to login remotely.
My brothers broadband when he was with PN was down for three months, mainly ORs fault but the way PN handled things made it so much harder, in the end I raised a CEO level complaint and it was fixed in 4 days! This was when the ticket system existed and you could get through on the phone.
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I would go batshit if the Internet were down for a day. I'm mostly bed-bound, so the Internet keeps me sane. Mrs Weaver runs her own business from home and requires constant comms.
I luckily have decent if slow 3G as a backup, although that vanishes every time there's a serious lightning storm or area-wide power outage, which I think is an outrage and unacceptable in public safety terms. (People driving, or at sea or in the mountains may depend on the mobile networks for their lives.)
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I'm sorry @Jelv - but it sounds that you are in effect using it as a business critical connection if it being down requires you lots of expenses, time etc as it is essential to you.
You should be using a business grade supplier with a priority service level agreement (SLA) not a cheap as chips domestic mass market broadband supplier - which is what plusnet now is.
I know people who run their domestic broadband on a business grade connection exactly becasue they want a 'service' if it goes wrong and not have to wade though the morass of domestic grade call centres.
...and Plusnet is this because that is how the domestic market has developed. Now that there are no genuine 'new' customers growth can only be achieved by a combination of race to the bottom low prices, and special short term offers to poach those from other ISP's.
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You should be using a business grade supplier with a priority service level agreement (SLA) not a cheap as chips domestic mass market broadband supplier - which is what plusnet now is.
???
Please refer to the subject of this topic!
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I left Plusnet after nine months. They never managed to address the major issue which was intermittent huge latency. In reality I don't think their knowledge of networking and DSL was sufficient for them to even understand the problem, let alone know where to look. It was something to do with upload, as when it was in a bad mood I could trigger the problem with around 90-100K (bits/sec) upload. I'm happy to say that no such problem exists on A&A which doubly confirms it was a Plusnet issue and not exchange or my end.
In the end the relationship with Plusnet just soured to the extent that they were pretty much saying that since I was running faster that "the estimate" I shouldn't be complaining, combined with suggestions of putting me onto a 1meg fixed rate.
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I'm actually giving up on AAISP and looking for another ISP.
Not Plusnet though!
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Why?
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I left Plusnet after nine months. They never managed to address the major issue which was intermittent huge latency. In reality I don't think their knowledge of networking and DSL was sufficient for them to even understand the problem, let alone know where to look. It was something to do with upload, as when it was in a bad mood I could trigger the problem with around 90-100K (bits/sec) upload. I'm happy to say that no such problem exists on A&A which doubly confirms it was a Plusnet issue and not exchange or my end.
In the end the relationship with Plusnet just soured to the extent that they were pretty much saying that since I was running faster that "the estimate" I shouldn't be complaining, combined with suggestions of putting me onto a 1meg fixed rate.
What issues were you having with latency? I believe I get something similar. A Small upload (in terms of % total of line capacity) sends the latency up as high as 200ms+.
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With traffic shaping there is these considerations.
A traffic shaper needs to make itself the bottleneck so it can manipulate the way traffic flows. Assuming we not talking about DPI stuff which can manipulate in other ways.
Higher traffic queue depths will make it less likely packets get dropped but more likely latency increases (bufferbloat).
There is various different types of shaper models available for use, such as codel and PRIQ.
An isp like plusnet run there own shaper systems which can frustrate users as it takes control away from them, it can also be a blessing tho if someone wants that automatically handled and are happy with the way the plusnet system works.
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What issues were you having with latency? I believe I get something similar. A Small upload (in terms of % total of line capacity) sends the latency up as high as 200ms+.
That's effectively what I was seeing, although the numbers were higher on my slow line. When it was bad it was hundreds of milliseconds RTT. I don't think Plusnet traffic shaping would be relevant if the effect is triggered by upload, their traffic shaping would apply to download traffic and the whole problem was that these high latency episodes would slow download to a crawl.
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I'm actually giving up on AAISP and looking for another ISP.
Why, out of interest?
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A troll?
Morseman Just arrived
Posts: 1 (1 per day)
Date Registered: 09-01-2017, 15:10:47
Last Active:09-01-2017, 16:16:34
One post and then doesn't come back!
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Perhaps, indeed. AA do have their share of awkward or unhappy customers and those who don't like paying their bills, if memory serves. Perhaps he was just shy.