On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 12:36 +0100, David Simon Cooper wrote:
As I said I earlier, I intend to move to plusnet as they are a fairly good ISP, I will look at blackcat first though.
Sadly I have to withdraw my former recommendations of PlusNet for the following reasons.
1. In a recent change to their T's and C's Customers on the low end products may get booted after 30 minutes of line inactivity (although see reason 2) Some ADSL routers can be a little inconsistent as to automatically reconnecting so this could be a major pain to those on these products (I am on an unaffected product but this still sounds annoying) I guess a mail client that checks for new messages every 15 minutes will get around this...making the whole idea even more redundant.
2. Almost every press release or mass communication with PlusNet customers is either withdrawn, amended or contradicted in a later release....this has become something of a running joke in the user forums.
3. Speaking of the user forums, there are strong rumours that Users have had service withdrawn (not just access to the forums) for posting repeated negative (non abusive) comments about PlusNet's service.
4. They have amended the T's and C's to include traffic shaping, but they refuse to release details of the shaping rules or any further details about this, which accounts are shaped or if the shaping is only present at peak times.
5. They have a really vague policy on the download caps on their network for the premier accounts. Leaving some customers like myself not sure whether they are capped or not. It seems that the Premier service is capped at 100GB a month (which is pretty generous as I use about 5-6 on average) but it's a vague soft cap that has never been announced to anyone other than those that have exceeded it....the cap is way above my usage but some clear notification as to it's presence would be helpful.
6. The extra value services (like site hosting, Usenet servers, Forums, Site builder etc) are all oversubscribed/under-provisioned, meaning that the only reason to go for the premier service is that you may or may not have a cap and you get around the brain dead idle disconnect business.
It's a shame because technically their service is pretty good, I have had no connection outages or problems to speak of, and the few questions I have had to put to their support have been answered swiftly.
But they just keep changing their minds about the service you get - Capped, not capped, interesting fair usage policy (now withdrawn) Free 8MB MaxDSL upgrades (now withdrawn). At one point last month I vowed into migrating, but then as if by chance the free 2MB upgrade I was promised in April appeared and I decided that the pain I would suffer in changing email addresses moving a few sites hosted on their service etc was not worth the bother until I move house or something.
Personally I would look around on ADSLGuide before using Plusnet