And Like That….

Plusnet’s announcement was a damp squib. They brought in a sustainable usage policy. If this had meant maximum usage from your account until a certain limit was met then fine, especially as I was no where near there cap limits. However the caps and punishments were on top of the shaping applied to my account. All week Usenet has been dog slow.

So I voted with my feet, grabbed my MAC code this afternoon and filled in the form at F2S. Hopefully be on at least the same speeds but uncapped in a couple of weeks. With some luck I may even be migrated to 8Meg as my exchange is one of the lucky few. Fingers crossed. I’ve also made sure I’m on a monthly account just in case there are more issues with F2S than I can currently see. At least they seem to communicate more efficiently than Plusnet. Even today when I phoned to get my MAC key they said there were no issues with shaping at their end and what I was seeing was limited to me – the forums are awash with Usenet issues at the moment. Head in the sand I fear which is a shame as the support from Plusnet was generally excellent.

Where did it all go wrong?

Maybe I’ve just been lucky. In general I’ve had no major issues with my broadband providers. BT certainly were poor with support and since joining PlusNet I’ve never had any major issues. Great reliability, consistent speeds, good pricing and importantly a good support service and staff that are willing to talk and share information. Since Jan 2004 it’s been pretty refreshing. I’ve even recommended then and got the referral discounts to prove it. However April this year saw some changes for Plusnet. These have only got worse over the last 6-8 weeks.

Some background – Plusnet operate 3 accounts – Pay As You Go, Plus and Premier. The first two are for average users, not going to download much and hence have traffic shaping applied. This basically means that p2p and Usenet downloading is restricted to fairly low speeds. You knew this when signing up so can’t complain that when sharing or downloading using these two methods that it’s slow. Premier accounts were to be free from shaping. No download limits either.

First issue was back in April when Plusnet cancelled the roll out of it’s fair usage policy. This was the idea that £22 a month gave you a 30Gig download limit but at the fastest speed possible from your exchange. Therefore when Max DSL is launched a potential 8Meg speed for £22 was being offered. £30 got you 80Gig, £40 got you 150Gig. Sounded great and for most users made sense. Some of the big downloaders (greater than 100Gig every month) felt this was robbery. However I felt it was fair to pay for your usage of the service as 0.5% of the users were using 20% of the available network bandwidth.

Plusnet removed this scheme before it was launched instead reverting to £22 for speeds up to 2 Meg, £30 for 4Meg and £40 for 8Meg. The problem was they told no-one about it instead putting the details in a forum posting. At this stage (and to this day) 4 & 8Meg wasn’t available. They said people could keep paying this rate and that would get them first on the list when Max DSL is launched. What a con. People to this day are still paying £40 not realising they could be getting the same service for £22. The reason – nobody from Plusnet has officially told them their account has changed and Plusnet say it is illegal for them to e-mail the users and let them know of the changes. Plusnet also say they can’t move people to the cheaper account as that’s illegal too. Profiteering at it’s most blatent. It’s scary to think how many people are un-aware of this and paying almost double what they should be.

Since then the mis-communication has continued. Around six weeks ago the Plusnet and ADSLGuide forums were awash with premier users saying that p2p speeds had dropped – is there shaping being applied. This was denied for around 10 days before an official (forum) announcement that to protect the service for everyone and not just the nasty few people who download torrents shaping had been applied to the Premier service too. However the impact was alleged to be neglible – around an extra 5 minutes for every hour you download. Fine I thought – no biggie and not much impact. However I couldn’t help feeling slightly peeved that they had changed the terms and conditions of my account again without any prior notice or warning and had done so by using a forum which the majority of users will never visit.

Next came idle timeouts for Pay As You Go and Plus users. If Plusnet detect your connection as being idle for more than 30 minutes they will disconnect you. This helps then reduce network bandwidth and better manage the network. Should have no real impact on end users although some will have to re-boot their modem to get a new connection. WHAT?!?! The whole point of broadband was to provide a fast and always available internet connection, especially if you invest in a router that is likely to be never switched off. While not affecting me I think this is a crazy decision and like the shaping, who know’s if it will apply to Premier accounts one day.

During all this, Plusnet kicked out two users who asked too many questions and also ditched a few ‘bad boys’. These were users who used too much bandwidth over a few months of use. Plusnet repeatedly failed to publish how much is too much saying that there were no caps. After a few weeks a figure of 100Meg was published (in the forums only) and even to this day the forum post is quoted by Plusnet as ‘official guidelines have been published and known by users for months’. That means 6 weeks a go we posted a figure that was lost in amongst 100 other postings that were read by a few thousand users out of our greater than 100,000 userbase.

For me this week has seen a new low. Since Monday any Usenet downloads between 18:00 and early morning are being shaped drastically. A download from a newsgroup started at 17:30 with a speed of 230k/sec. Nice. By 18:10 the speed had dropped to less than 100k/sec. By 19:00 it was hovering around 70k/sec. That’s not a kick in the teeth off a 1/2 Meg account. Plusnet are denying that anything is wrong or has been changed. They say to increase number of connections to the news server – 10 connections took the speed of one user to 110k. At any other time the speed with just 2 connections was 230k/sec – nothing going on? While defending their position Plusnet pointed out some stats that have been published by the people who make their shaping and management hardware/software – Ellacoya. This report highlights the amount of traffic seen in Europe broadband accounts. Nearly 2/3rds of all traffic is p2p file sharing. That’s a lot. Surprisingly Usenet made up 2.3% of the traffic. Yet Plusnet are drastically throttling Usenet access. While I understand Plusnet are a business and have to manage their networks in the most cost effective way possible this seems crazy.

Whether I download 1Gig or 100Gig if it’s during the core usage hours my speed will be throttled. Like the idle disconnects, is this really what a broadband society was to deliver? When I move to a 24Meg ADSL2 service next year, what’s the point if I’m throttled to a 1/2Meg service? Do gooders will point out that all p2p and Usenet is illegal and well done Plusnet for stamping it out. Blizzard deliver weekly patches, sometimes over 50Meg via p2p as do many other game developers. Many download sites now encourage users to use p2p to download demos and trailers as it reduces their bandwidth requirements. Many beta’s are released via p2p and Microsoft are developing their own p2p release mechanism.

The current model really has to change back to the proposed fair usage. Fast speed for all but a capped service unless you want to pay more. So for my £22 I get 2Meg ADSL, can download 30Gig a month but after that it’s throttled to a speed that will either encourage me to download at another time, pay more for an increased download limit or put me off altogether. The more I use – the more I pay. If this isn’t adapted then everyone is punished by shaping whether they download 1Gig or 100Gig

Again Plusnet are spreading gossip in forums that these issues will be addressed ‘in the near future’, possibly this week. They’ve also said that those paying £30 and £40 have increased download limits and that’s always been the case – crap. A forum post two weeks ago confirmed this for the first time even though the pricing structure has been in place since April. My biggest beef is the underhand way in which the terms and conditions are being changed without any pre or post notification. It really is a shocking way for a technology firm to behave especially when they have so many ways of communicating with their user base. If they can’t e-mail users why not flag up the changes when a user logs in to the Plusnet website instead of hiding important updates in various forums.

What grates is that I’ve recommended Plusnet to other people – I wouldn’t at the moment until things settle down. I still rate their support service and from reading elsewhere, Pipex and Demon who are two companies with great reputations are going through troubling times also. I’ll stick with Plusnet for the time being and can only hope the next announcement brings a bit more sense and stability to their offerings – if not it’s time to switch. Maybe all these announcements are Plusnet moving from being a broadband provider to a value broadband provider where those that only use a few gig a month deliver most profit. Time will tell.

Upgrades

upgrade
Switched on the pc this morning and as I got my AVG updates I thought…that was damned fast. Checked my e-mail and sure enough – my 2Meg upgrade has finally arrived. To celebrate I’m downloading 3.5Gb’s of N64 roms to go with the 2000 SNES roms that I downloaded last week. They’ll live on the Xbox for the odd time I fancy some retro gaming. As Ricky would say…woof!

 

Confusion…pity the consumer

After my PlusNet raves it was bound to fly back in my face. PlusNet have now announced that they aren’t going to implement a Fair Usage Policy after all but instead use contention levels to deliver their service and cut down on those who abuse (i.e. continually download). Instead of a 30Gig + unlimited overnight downloads it will be £21.99 for an unlimited but contended service. Contention will be set at 30:1 and unless you go above 5:1 contention that’s it – no speed cuts, no download limits. Good.

The confusion this has caused is massive – 16 pages of posts and counting and two very confusing posts from PlusNet employee’s –

If you mean will shaping apply, then yes, but as I said the amount and type will vary based on the products which haven’t been announced so I’ll say no more.

and on another thread at almost precisely the same time

I can confirm that traffic shaping isn’t being applied across the product range. It will be applied on Broadband Plus, but not across the board on Premier.

While this has totally changed the PlusNet view of the last 3 months they have also announced to compliment this new Premier products, but they felt it would confuse the user if they revealed the specifics – please wait for the 28th of April for more details. Bloody Hell.

Until now I’ve been happy with PlusNet – great service and support and night and day compared to BT Broadband. Their service is still top notch but their communications team need a shake. All they do is confuse the user and dropping little bits of info through forum posts only confuses users more and leads to, ultimately, users drifting off to other providers. I’m more than happy to be paying £21.99 for 2Meg and the heavy users suffering a poorer service however I will not accept traffic shaping of any kind. Time to check out other providers in case I need to change. Where’s the phone number for UK Online?. Their £29.99 for 8Meg is getting more tempting by the day.

Cheaper Broadband

After a short wait and lot’s of hoping PlusNet have finally launched their new pricing structure. So today I was able to switch to 1Meg broadband, around 200Gb download cap and a hopeful upgrade to 2Meg in the next month or so for a monthly fee of £21.99. Lovely. Had to pay £14.99 to change from paying £29.99 a month but I’ll make that back by summer.

Just need to wait for BT to start rolling out their 8Meg products later in the year to get 8Meg for £21.99 – that will be a bargain.

Hard Sell

UK Online have now installed their LLU gear in my exchange. I know because in the last 4 days I’ve had two letters and two phone calls telling me all about it. That means I could have 8Meg downloads with 400k uploads for a mere £39.99 a month. That speed comes with a 500Gb monthly cap and a free wireless router – not too shabby a deal especially compared with NTL/Telewest who’s 3 & 4Meg deals seem dear in comparison, especially with the new caps introduced by NTL although it will be interesting to see how they implement them – kick people off who regularly abuse? (The cable company’s really should be offering far more to hammer home their fibre network advantage. Shame.)

Despite the temptation I will be sticking it out with PlusNet. From next month I will hopefully be on 2Meg for £21.99 a month. If the BT trials are successful I should then have the opportunity to move to up to 8Meg download and 1/2Meg upload later in the year again for £21.99. Bargain. Even if that falls through the UK Online deal will still be there – they just need to improve their performance if Adslguide forums are anything to go by. More speed – can’t wait.

PlusNet Upgrades

PlusNet have announced changes to their broadband packages. As expected they’ve moved to charging on a download capacity basis rather than speed. April will see all their customers moving to the fastest line possible from their exchange and later in the year onto 4 & 8Meg connections if the exchange supports it. Class. Details of the fair usage policy can be found here – £21.99 per month for 2Meg speed and potentially 230Gig download a month sounds an absolute bargain 🙂

Sea Change

After mentioning broadband earlier this week it looks like some exciting developments will start to move fast internet access forward in the UK. ADSL has been for many the only way to get broadband access, and has always looked a slightly poorer cousin compared to cable. NTL but more so Telewest have always offered faster download speeds for a comparable if not cheaper price than ADSL providers. Indeed Telewest now offer 4Meg downloads with NTL offering 3Meg.

However Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) is now starting to happen across the country and not just in London and the South East. UK Online and Bulldog are offering ADSL speeds of up to 8Meg with an increased upload of 400k. BT has also announced they will be trialling 8Meg download speeds from April this year and also testing ADSL2+ this year which can see broadband speeds go up to 18Meg (depending on line length from exchange). All this is great news but the pricing structure of broadband will have to change radically to support these speed increases.

This is where (I think) Max DSL comes in. From April BT will launch Max DSL which allows ISP’s to set your download speed to the maximum available on your line. Initially this will be to 2Meg but hopefully by year end it will be whatever your line can take up to 8Meg. This is great for the customer as it can be done transparently by the ISP but how will the price of your connection change? I think most ISP’s will move to a pricing structure that gives you bandwidth rather than speed. So £20 gives you 50Gig per month, £25 70Gig and so on. This will allow then to charge the heavy users who use up bandwidth the most money and likewise charge less for the smaller users who only use a few gigabytes per month. Most of the big ADSL providers have been introducing download caps and indeed NTL will be doing likewise for their broadband users. This is all well and good as long as the ISP provide clear guidelines and allow users to track their usage which is something my provider, Plus Net, has done since day one.

Indeed Plus Net is seemingly going to make an announcement next week on their future pricing structure for premier account holders. I’m hoping it will include details on upgrades, their fair usage policy and also future plans for the year ahead but it may just detail price and speed changes. I’ll just need to wait and see but finally the UK market is starting to catch up with the rest of Europe…but not the Swedes who can get 100MBit/s for 54 US dollars a month. Drool.

Giving up Broadband?

Read an article on the BBC news site about a user giving up on broadband. Now that I’ve used broadband I just could not do without it. In some ways that’s a fairly sad statement to make and obviously there are more important aspects to life. But to go back to dial-up, wait an age for a simple page to come up, watching the minutes that I’m online, worry about receiving large e-mails and a total lack of online gaming would be unacceptable. When I moved house last year one of the first checks was could I get broadband!

It can no longer be a cost issue either. PlusNet are now doing a lite broadband package for £14.99 – and that’s for a 2Meg connection. Many dial-ups are either the same price or only slightly cheaper. Even AOL has just announced an unlimited 2Meg package for £29.99. In my book connections, I hope, can only get faster and hopefully they will address uploads as well.

Speaking of broadband, to see what’s available at your exchange check out the Broadband Availability Checker at The Broadband Resource. You can also see what capacity is like at your exchange (mines is full and been awaiting upgrades since November).

Autumn Clearing

With Autumn now officially here and a break in the wet weather we’ve been having it was time for the final grass cut of the year. This then turned into a garden clearance (never did I thought so many plants would last for such a small time). Cue 10 bags filled and a trip to the dump. To round it off, a trip to Dobbies to restock the barren wasteland that was the garden. One point…since when did garden centres clear out half there shop to stock MASSIVE amounts of crimbo decorations. Blimey. I guess it is only 10 weeks on Saturday till Christmas.

The second clearout was the pc. Only 3 months old and running out of room (it only has 160Gb)? A swift clearout later and I’d freed 60Gb. Shocking the amount of guff you accumulate with broadband. Having the 1 Meg connection doesn’t help. Time to get the old pc set-up as a server and put all the movies and music on it instead.