PlusNet are now throttling all protocols to a maximum of 2Mbps during
their 16 hours of peak time per day (ie when most people are awake). So
the brave new world of 8Mbps high speed internet is just a pipe dream
and PlusNet's customers would have been better off on the old 2Mbps
fixed line speed - especially since PlusNet have also announced that
they have rolled out draconian new limits on so-called critical real
time protocols eg VoIP and gaming (blaming a couple of smart kids who
allegedly managed to download 40Gb of data disguised as VoIP - which in
turn was only possible because PlusNet had forgotten to monitor its
customers' monthly download limits).

What a farce! These wide boys haven't bought any centrals since I was a
lad and they say that they don't intend to - actually, they say that
they don't need to and they won't review their position unless they get
an increase in customers (dream on) or until next spring when BT drops
its prices. This ISP claims to lead while others follow - but they
forgot to take account of customers' changing usage habits. And BT want
to shell out £67m for their "expertise"!!??

They call themselves the ISP of choice for the savvy net user but now
they wouldn't suit most grannies.

Stan

Stan The Man <man@pr100.com> wrote in news:291120060029457523%
man@pr100.com:

I think you've misunderstood that one. From what I gather, this is due to
some phrasing that has been introduced (which I believe Zen introduced
before PlusNet). The reasoning is that this is a BT stated limit in their
wholesale agreement. BT are not guarenteeing that capacity will provide
enough for more than 2mbps at peak time.
PlusNet and Zen are restating this info to their customers.

What I did see when looking into this though (with PlusNet) was that VoIP
is being capped to 192kbps, and gaming to 512kbps - which must be a pain
if you want several calls at once or maybe a game decides it wants you to
download a big update before it'll let you play again.

--
Colin
*Drop DEAD from the email address to reply*

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:29:45 +0000, Stan The Man <man@pr100.com> wrote:

WRONG!

Check out uk.people.silversurfers, you'll find many granny (and grandad)
Plusnet 'fanbois' on there.

And that's now Plusnet's target audience.

People who want nothing more from the Internet than to check their
email, to post to a couple of newsgroups, and to shove a few pictures on
a website now and again.

Oldies that chant "better the devil you know" whenever you suggest to
them they could get *far* better value for money elsewhere...

On 29 Nov 2006, Simon aka Stan The Man <man@pr100.com> wrote:

Must make you still "a lad" then, "Stan".

(At least, untrue if you are over 15! :-)

Stan The Man wrote:
Isn't it 8 hours during their peak time between of between 4pm and midnight?

Great Eastern wrote:
You don't think Stan is going to let facts get in the way of his hysterical
outbursts do you?

Peter Crosland

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:29:45 +0000, Stan The Man <man@pr100.com>
wrote:

The factual and correct information in the above post is summarised on
the next line:





--
Alex Heney, Global Villager
Remember, Subaru spelled backwards is U-R-A-BUS.
To reply by email, my address is alexATheneyDOTplusDOTcom

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006 Stan The Man wrote:

Last time I checked, their peak hours totalled 8 per day: 4 p.m. to
midnight.
--
Thoss

Stan The Man wrote:
Whilst I have to join you in condemnation of Plusnet's service. I just did a
speed test and got 5.6mbps (max off-peak being 6mbps)

It is their throttling of some news servers and p2p that I find more
concerning.
I haven't been able to connect to news.grc.com since the beginning of the
month and p2p has been totally blocked since then as well.
But both connect fine by dialup.
They accuse me of downloading binary news, yet grc.com don't carry any
binary groups. As I can connect to the MSnews and Readfreenews servers this
suggests they have blocked GRC by IP. (?) Are they blocking any other news
IPs?
As for p2p they say don't use p2p in peak time yet my client is scheduled to
only use off peak.
But the crazy bit is lots of other Plusnet users can connect to GRC and to
p2p. But some others, like me, can't. So they are blocking only some
customers!

Slatts

On 29 Nov 2006, "Sla#s" <phil@KNOTslatts.net> wrote:

It depends what account type you have as to the level of throttling.
The Broadband Plus account is probably the least usable for anything but
web browsing and e-mail, and one reason why I switched from that to a PAYG
account, a long time ago now.

Ages ago there was a posting in the customer-services newsgroup with a list
of news servers which carried text-only groups and which they added to the
Ellacoya filters to allow reasonable speeds. Best put a comment on either
the Usergroup ( http://usergroup.plus.net/forum/index.php?board=22.0 ) or
PlusNet "Discussion forums" when logged into the "Member Centre" section.

The default is to be 'throttled' (to a degree you get timeouts, though the
response that might come from their scripts could be "access is not blocked
but speed is not guaranteed and connection might not be reliable")

Depends on account type. Seems even business users get some throttling of
some traffic types, and given the prices paid, that seems only to guarantee
a wish for those customers (at the very least) to consider switching quite
seriously. Without knowing what account type you are on, can only suggest
considering a switch to Premier (if your traffic exceeds 5 GB a month) or
consider PAYG pricing (been a while since the minimum of 2 GB came into
force, and the extras are a bit more generous now...)

--
Change to DSL Max the way I did: switch ISP <http://www.dslmax.info/>

"Sla#s" <phil@KNOTslatts.net> wrote in message
news:456dce49$0$8753$ed2619ec@ptn-nntp-reader02.plus.net...

I had the same problem with P2P on Plusnet.
I raised a ticket yesterday and my account settings were changed today.
All is OK again.
Suggest you do likewise?

George

George Weston wrote:
I have raised 4 since the begining of the month.
Each time they close it before sorting the problem.
As in saying; stop downloading binaries, when I am not!

Slatts

Why don't you just migrate to a decent ISP, who values their customers and
delivers what they pay for?

Dan wrote:
Well I will be shortly if my problems are not sorted. However from many
posts here and elsewhere I gather that the internet service in general is
falling apart. Almost every ISP has a large group of disgruntled users. OK
this is matched by a group who say they have no problems with that ISP but
if you are one of those with the problems, you are disinclined to jump out
of the frying pan!
Which is what I seem to have done by moving from Wanadoo to Plusnet. :-(

Slatts

Ian:
So which ISP offers 8Mb/s at less then Plus Net's £14.99 ?
(Bandwidth limits / traffic shaping are of no concern to 'oldies').
Regards,
Martin

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006 18:15:35 -0000, "Sla#s" <phil@KNOTslatts.net>
wrote:

There certainly is hard evidence of connections being throttled to 2M
(which doesn't affect me as I only have 2M) although I believe my
connection was actually pegged at 1M and even 512k at some times over
the past week. It was certainly *very* strange that multiple speed
tests at multiple sites all came up with (almost) exactly 1/2 or 1/4
or what it should have been almost regardless of gateway being used.

However, it would also appear that throttling is being done on ALL
accesses to some specific sites as well as dependent on type of data
being transferred and protocol being used. Access to sites such as
rapidshare, google/youtube and other similar or streaming sites is
almost certainly being severely stomped on - to the point of being
virtually unusable. <10kB/s for over a week on a lightly used Premier
A/C is not quite the level of performance expected for HTTP when my
usage over an entire quarter wouldn't reach the monthly FUP limit
Esp when it had been running quite happily at almost line speed
regardless of time of day and network loading for as long as I can
remember ! All other data transfers to/from other sites were
generally as expected as well so absolutely no chance of contention
being the primary issue.

High BW sites are almost certainly now being throttled as are HTTP DLs
in general in addition to the P2P, USENET and ftp (although I believe
ftp is sorted now) throttling which has been happening for some time.

--
Mike
email: mikeb <at> twowheels <dot> plus <dot> com

On 30 Nov 2006, "Martin²" <never@give.one> wrote:

Namesco/NDO and probably a few others. Up to the end of August they
had a deal where the first year (including activation and a 1-port
Zyxel router) cost 60 pounds (plus 4.99 delivery for the router).
Now they have an activation fee, and a monthly charge (below the
14.99 fee you mention) but to be honest, why - if limits and any
traffic shaping are of no concern - would "up to 8 Mbps" be of
special interest - a fixed 500, 1000 or 2000 kbps would be as
good or perhaps more stable anyway.

As it happens the 60 pound deal was for a fixed 500 kbps service *but*
NDO now (like so many other ISPs) offer the customer an up to 8 Mbps
(so it does meet the challenge of speed and lower cost anyway! :-)

I'm not with PN but using Eclipse, at 14.99, on Evolution level 1,
with a 20 GB limit (in their peak hours, of 1800 to 0000) and no
fixed limits "off peak" but a "fair use" policy. Some hate FUP
because they aren't in a position to know what limits apply,
and in the case of Eclipse, some claim that traffic shaping is
making the service poor, along with LLU using Tiscali being put
on some customer lines, (without disclosure that Tiscali is their
'partner'). Evolution level 1 is meant to get lowest priority so
in theory there might be some poorer speeds, compared with levels
2, 3, or 4, but someone on dslzoneuk.net claimed they found level
4 (at 29.99/month) "unusable" while I've found level 1 to be OK
for my needs... 6 GB transferred in the last 72-96 hours (it
was partly downloading of podcasts, viewing webcams, and using
a peer to peer application, plus streaming audio 24x7, some will
have been saved using Total Recorder, so not yet listened to).

--
Change to DSL Max the way I did: switch ISP <http://www.dslmax.info/>

On 29 Nov 2006, Great Eastern <ger@ger.ger> wrote:

I think they have blurred the situation, rather, because they count traffic
as being "peak" from 1600 to 0000 on 2 od 3 accounts, but also have PAYG
with no counting of traffic between 0000 and 0800, and it's anyone's guess
for Broadband Plus as to what traffic shaping is done - when I was using
that account it seemed to work fastest after 0100 and I think it went
back to being dreadfully slow around 0800 but they always kept the
"how it works" (including what the slow and slowest speeds) details
to themselves, rather than make it clear to customers just how slow the
traffic could be (to the point most Usenet connections simply timed out
so were unusable for 16 hours a day, and slow or very slow overnight).

Sla#s wrote:
news.grc.com is prioritised along with the following servers:-

news.individual.net
news.cadsoft.de
news.mozilla.org
news.microsoft.com
text.giganews.com
news.datemas.de
news.eurekalog.com
news.devexpress.com
newsgroups.borland.com
news.lmd.de
news.nevrona.com
news.soft-gems.net
news.digital-metaphors.com
www.berneda.com
206.123.68.235
support.atozedsoftware.com
forums.talkto.net
news.opera.com
secnews.netscape.com
asp-member.cifnet.net
belgarath.linuxfromscratch.org
cnews1.corel.ca
dev-forums.novell.com
dizzy.quo.to
eclipse.org
et.symantec.com
london.vmware.com
msnews.microsoft.com
news.cesmail.net
news.gradwell.net
news.rennlist.org
news.x-privat.org
news.grc.com
sea.gmane.org
sunsite.dk
support-forums.novell.com
vip106.sybase.com

Rgds,

--
|Bob Pullen Broadband Solutions for
|Support Home & Business @
|PlusNet plc. www.plus.net
+------ PlusNet - The smarter way to Internet! -----

PlusNet Support Team <support@plus.net> wrote:

Funny, supplier calls it prioritised, customers call it crippled.
--