"Dave" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:42bf15fc$0$41914$(E-Mail Removed)...
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2005 18:49:21 +0100, "J Willis"
> <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>>I have recently joined Plusnet and would just like to say I am very
>>satisfied with their 2mb ADSL.
>>Getting through to their customer service is quick and their staff I've
>>found to be polite and helpful.
>>It is refreshing to see a company perform in such an efficient and
>>professional manner for there are so many that don't.
>>Well done Plusnet for you have set the standard for other Broadband
>>providers to try and follow.
>
> I think they're shit.
You're entitled to your opinion, though I'd be most interested to hear the
evidence to support your argument.
I've always found their support line to handle calls quickly (either by
email or phone) and to give a helpful, professional, non-patronising
response - in a British English accent! (In this Brave New World, it's
probably un-PC to express a preference for the accent of the person, but on
the many times I've dealt with call centres in India - BT, Wanadoo - I've
had extreme difficulty in understanding and being understood. As a
communications exercise, Indian call centres fail badly. I'm a Brit and I
want to deal with Brits - is that such a bad thing? I wouldn't expect people
in India to be put through to a call centre in England. OK, little rant
over!)
The reliability of their service is fairly good, though their mail and/or
news servers do go down more than they should. Today their news server has
had several long interruptions to its in-feed, so there have been several
hours when no new messages have arrived - but that's fairly rare.
Once, a few months ago, they lost everybody's web sites because of a server
crash. Their not having a backup was unfortunate but their failure to email
everyone immediately to say "Ever so sorry - you'll have to upload your
sites again but we won't deduct that traffic from your monthly limit" was
inexcusable. I think that's the only time that I've been disappointed in
them. Of course I have my own copy of my sites so it was only an annoyance
to have to upload them all again - no real harm was done.
The cost is very competitive: I pay £14.99 for 2 Mbps 1 GB/month, with £1.90
for every additional GB. Having got several months' evidence of typical
usage, I might upgrade to a permanent 2 GB limit which would cost an
additional £1.50 (slight discount because it's not "unarranged borrowing").
I think that the so-called unlimited bandwidth costs £21.99, but I'm not
sure of that figure - someone from PN will no doubt correct me if I'm wrong.
The transfer rate is generally very good: on my 2 Mbps line I typically get
between 1.4 and 2.0 Mbps depending on time of day and hence the amount of
contention. Subjectively (and I've not done any quantitative tests) my line
seems to be faster than many of my customers' 2 Mbps lines with AOL, BT etc
whenever I'd had to download drivers for them.
You get Microsoft Front Page Extension web-space (not sure what the size
limit is), unlimited email addresses (addresses are of the form
anything@your_domain.f9.co.uk), CGI/PHP space and a MySQL database (the last
two are for designing dynamic database-driven web sites).
I'd certainly recommend PlusNet (specifically Force9, who I'm with) to
anyone.
By the way, I have no financial interest in PlusNet, other than as a
satisfied customer!