Plusnet Broadband Plus question

This looks very good value at £14.99 pm, but the downside is contained
in the following:

"With Broadband Plus you can use any type of Internet services you
want. In order to ensure we deliver a high level of service, during
busy periods we will give priority to services such as web browsing and
email and a lower priority to high usage services such as downloading
and file sharing."

Can anyone on this tariff tell me what this actually means in practical
terms please? I mostly just browse the net, no file sharing, but
occasional downloads of, say, 250mb. Would these downloads be
impossibly slow, or is it still possible to download at, say, half
speed?

If these downloads are impossibly slow, can anyone recommend an
alternative please at up to, say, £20pm? Thanks for any help.

I switched from PAYG to PLUS in April, and don't notice any difference.
We (2 homeworkers + kids ) use it a lot, but not for P2P or binary
downloads.
Newsgroups are subject to 'traffic shaping', but again no discernible effect
on text newsgroups.
Their busy period is from 16 - 22, so it shouldn't be difficult to do any
heavy downloads outside that time, but I have updated newly installed WinXP
& Office which was 80Mb+ during a weekday evening
and it went very fast (2Mb/s connection).
The alternative is PAYG at £14.99 with 1GB inc. and £1 per extra GB,
or the Premier unlimited service at £21.99.

If you sign up with PlusNet I hope that you would be kind enough to use my
ID 'wester' as a referrer and save me few pence, thanks.
Regards,
Martin

On 25 Jun 2005 15:57 -0700, "Peter P" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Can anyone on this tariff tell me what this actually means in practical
>terms please? I mostly just browse the net, no file sharing, but
>occasional downloads of, say, 250mb.

Sorry, cannot comment as a user, but you could ask on the ADSLguide forum
for Plus.Net users, or sign up for a free 3 month trial of their news +
mail account, and later on, upgrade if you went for that ADSL account.

Since traffic is affected most in 'peak hours' you might like to see
<http://portal.plus.net/support/adsl/troubleshooting/adsl_utilisation.shtml>
and the 'trough' in demand is for roughly 8 hours after midnight.

PN staff, in the past, have commented that anything which requires fairly
high traffic is likely to be given lower priority. I don't know if that's
likely to affect something like a big/medium file transfer or streaming,
but it would be a bit odd if some types of 'web browsing' was also 'traffic
shaped' while other types of use weren't. I'd expect to be able to watch
some streaming video (else there'd be some warning about not having the
ability to use the BBC broadband services, if there was a problem). One
Skype user has indicated no problems using that. Asking here might not
find many users with the same pattern of use as yours (and even in the
PN newsgroups, there might be relatively few, seeing how most threads
are started if someone thinks there's a problem :-)

>If these downloads are impossibly slow, can anyone recommend an
>alternative please at up to, say, £20pm? Thanks for any help.

You'd be able to switch to the Premier account (21.99) if you did think
there was a speed problem, or the PAYG account (but if usage was below
10 GB a month, you might be better switching to Metronet's PAYGo 2000
on a price range from 18.75 [which includes 10 GB of traffic - but do
remember if you did switch, you'd have to pay Plus.Net for the line
activation as you'd be leaving]). In a week's time one line here
will be switched to the Plus account, so I'd be able to comment on
how fast or slow I find it... I sometimes download and watch films
from CinemaNow.com and use radio and video services (there's a very
fast webcam at Boston Uni. in the USA). Peter Morgan.


--

UK ADSL <http://tinyurl.com/5jpa4> - Happy to save cash with Plus.Net!!
E-mail + files - 30 day free trial - <http://web.vfm-deals.com/runbox/>
USENET news service? <http://tinyurl.com/3rjw4> (plans from under US$5)

Thanks for the help so far - much appreciated. Looking at adslguide, I
see that Demon now do a 2mb deal for £20 a month - apparently
unlimited, though I'm checking that out with them. This would do me
well, I think, unless anyone has any criticisms of the deal.

On 26 Jun 2005 07:44, I wrote:

>PN staff, in the past, have commented that anything which requires fairly
>high traffic is likely to be given lower priority. I don't know if that's
>likely to affect something like a big/medium file transfer or streaming,
>but it would be a bit odd if some types of 'web browsing' was also 'traffic
>shaped' while other types of use weren't. I'd expect to be able to watch
>some streaming video (else there'd be some warning about not having the
>ability to use the BBC broadband services, if there was a problem).

I tried this out a little while ago (I did a speed test at about 17:20, then
tried using two Boston University webcams as video sources with no problem).

I also ran the ADSLguide Speed Test which showed a speed of around 1600 kbps
which suits me fine for what I want to do (leisure use - mostly radio with a
bit of binary newsgroup downloading but not much). Not sure how well VNC is
but I made a traffic graph: <http://mywebpages.org/PN-BB-Plus-20050628.jpg>
which will show the speeds were quite acceptable. Of course, I wasn't using
either of the 'traffic shaped' facilities (binary newsgroups, peer-to-peer).

--

UK ADSL <http://tinyurl.com/5jpa4> - Happy to save cash with Plus.Net!!