Hows plusnets fibre traffic shaping?

[new boy]

Hi

I'm looking to move from sky as the price has crept up to a silly level for basic broadband since I originly joined with o2.

With cash back and the like, I could save £5 a month from switching from my primus saver land line + sky 18mb broadband, to plusnets 38mb fibre.

I've never noticed any sort of traffic shaping on my basic sky broadband, but notice there is with plusnets, and was wondering if there's a danger of me actually ending up with worse download speed for certain tasks than before? Does anyone have first hand experience of how plusnets traffic management service works out in the real world?

Thanks

[AETAaAS]

I'm on the 38mbps fibre and never noticed any problems. Youtube 1080p streams reliably, have had multi gigabyte direct downloads pegged at ~4 megabytes (not bits) per second. Torrents are obviously a mixed bag depending on the seed/leech ratio and the individual users; but I have never noticed any untoward throttling. I have seen a number of positive comments about the ping on Plusnet and tend to agree, MP FPS games are pretty good on this connection.

[Alistair]

I am on the 80mbps package (It sits around 53-59 mbps). Usenet is full speed 24/7. I think torrents are managed at peak times but rarely use that so not 100% sure. I migrated from BT last year, even though they own Plusnet. Got cashback & half price broadband for 9 months. Not had any issues

[jackvdbuk]

im on the fibre and have had full speed all the time, really not noticed any shaping even at peak.

[new boy]

Thank you for your replies.

I have read them on done some further reading. And its seams that plusnets traffic management is genuinely reasonable.

[narz]

I was an old plusnet BB customer before they had traffic shaping and it went to pants then. I have since took a punt with them again with Fibre, when Sky took over O2 and couldn't be happier, with pings, http/torrent downloads. (18 months in)

[Ulti]

I'm thinking of leaving Sky Broadband if I can and moving to Plusnet 76mb optic fibre as Sky has a lot of lag spikes, which I assume is due to too many people being on Sky. It only feels like it's getting worse as I've seen lots of Sky deals around, meaning more and more people are going to join Sky, causing it to be more congested. It's not just during peak hours too, it can be on a standard week day at lunch or in the morning and even going into late night.

I'm not sure how long I'm staying with my family for (graduated a couple of months back and looking for a job so eventually I will leave) but there are currently 5 of us with usually 2-4 devices/PCs connected simultaneously - that would be my parents sharing one PC, my brother with his PC or phone, my sister on her phone or laptop myself on either PC/tablet/phone. All 5 of us do stream content to watch, and my brother and I both game and have Skype calls on most of the time, with me on video call with my gf. We only very occasionally torrent.

Download speed was never an issue with us, when the internet is working fine we can all stream fine. However, 2 ongoing skype calls with one of them being video does pretty much take up the 1Mb/s upload that we get, hence I'm thinking of moving to Plusnet's 76mb optic fibre package as it seems to offer up to 19Mb/s upload speeds so that should give me plenty of leeway.

Does anyone have that package without the phone line? We've already got a BT phone line and I doubt my parents fancy switching so I would like to keep that and just go for the £22.49 p/m package and pay the upfront costs and I was just wondering if anyone does that and if it's all been good with them with no noticeable downtime/traffic management/lag etc.

EDIT: Looked around on their website and noticed that the 38Mb/s package also has 19.5Mb/s upload speeds and it's only £17.49 p/m but then again that's only £5 a month = £60 a year and that's only like 1-2 meals in London.

Also found this on their site:

Why do we manage traffic?

Our broadband service is provided over a shared network. Bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transmitted) is shared between everybody who is connected to the network. This industry-wide method allows us to provide a reliable, high-speed service at an affordable price.

As customer numbers and usage grows, we have to increase the capacity of our network to make sure there's enough bandwidth for everyone. When the network is busy, it's easy for things to get out of control. Peer-to-peer, video streaming and large file downloads can flood the network quickly and use up the bandwidth. If this happens, it reduces the speed of web browsing, email, gaming and other types of web traffic. Traffic management prevents this from happening.

With traffic management we can do lots of clever things to make sure everyone gets a good, fair online experience. For example we can:

Make sure stuff that needs to be fast (like VoIP, VPN and gaming) is always prioritised - if these run slowly, they won’t work properly
Protect your interactive activities like web-browsing and email from download traffic such as music downloads
Provide a service relative to the amount each customer pays in terms of usage allowances and experience
Flex the network in the event of unusual demands in traffic or disaster situations (e.g. a network failure)

Hmm, they've worded it nicely. VoIP and gaming prioritised even when traffic managed, seems just what my brother and I care about. Now to see if I can leave Sky...

[new boy]

Been on it for a few days now. Very happy with the speeds.



The wirless on the router is crap. I'm looking for another one atm.

Does anyone have that package without the phone line? We've already got a BT phone line and I doubt my parents fancy switching so I would like to keep that and just go for the £22.49 p/m package and pay the upfront costs and I was just wondering if anyone does that and if it's all been good with them with no noticeable downtime/traffic management/lag etc.

Hmmm. I used cashback and the like and my 38mb is costing me an average of £17.xx a month INCLUDING line rental over the 18 months... could of had the 76mb + line rental for £22.xx a month If I wanted...

[Biscuit]

Im on the 80Mbps with plusnet and i never notice any significant slow down. In fairness, even if there was, even halving an 80Mbps line is still reasonable speeds. They would have to really tighten the belt for you to feel the difference i reckon.

[MrJim]

Been on it for a few days now. Very happy with the speeds.

The wirless on the router is crap. I'm looking for another one atm.

Hmmm. I used cashback and the like and my 38mb is costing me an average of £17.xx a month INCLUDING line rental over the 18 months... could of had the 76mb + line rental for £22.xx a month If I wanted...

At least Plusnet make it easy for you to use your own router if you want - Sky do just the opposite, which wouldn't be so much of a problem, if their own router wasn't so abysmal.

I've just moved to Plusnet too - got £140 from Quidco for doing so, which was nice!

[Ulti]

I've just paid to sign up on Plusnet's Fibre Extra (£22.49 p/m) and paid for everything, looking forward to being on board.

It's true I could have saved quite a bit of money if I waited for the Quidco cashback and got the phone line with it.

Let's do some calculations just for interest...

Right now I'll end up paying:
£22.49*18 + £50 (installation/activation charge) = £454.82 = £25.27 p/m.

If I got the phone line along with the Quidco cashback it would have been (if memory serves me right):
£8.99*6 + £19.99*12 + £155.88 (paying for 12 months line rental upfront) + £155.88*0.5 (paying for 6 months) - £140 = £387.64 = £21.54 p/m.

Wow, that would have been a lot cheaper if I followed that deal but oh well, I should be happy with what I've paid for.

[csgohan4]

At least Plusnet make it easy for you to use your own router if you want - Sky do just the opposite, which wouldn't be so much of a problem, if their own router wasn't so abysmal.

I've just moved to Plusnet too - got £140 from Quidco for doing so, which was nice!

Actually you can also use your own modem/router like a DSL N66U. The Sky user forums have a wealth of information to help set it up.

i've done this and I don't need to worry about a crappy modem like the Sky brick. Good for spares in case my modem/router packed in.

If your more technical you could use a modified BT open reach modem and peg your router to it.

[badass]

Everything's been fine.......except working from home. It seems that Cisco VPN traffic is throttled during peak times on my Plusnet 80/20 service. Makes it unusable during peak periods. The link in the office is uncontended and other services there are unaffected.

[MrJim]

Actually you can also use your own modem/router like a DSL N66U. The Sky user forums have a wealth of information to help set it up.

i've done this and I don't need to worry about a crappy modem like the Sky brick. Good for spares in case my modem/router packed in.

If your more technical you could use a modified BT open reach modem and peg your router to it.

Funnily enough I have an N66U I was using with Sky Broadband I didn't say it was impossible to use your own router, just that Sky make it quite difficult. Did you use Wireshark to find out your additional login information from your Sky router? It's a pain in the a***, to say the least! You can of course just plug your Sky router into your own router in order to 'bridge' them, but then you have to have another power socket etc. With Plusnet you just enter your login details & off you go

[Ulti]

Had a guy from BT come in on Tuesday to get the fibre up and running and I was happy the last two days...



But then I noticed suddenly today, websites were slowing to a crawl so I hopped onto speedtest and found:





After about 10 minutes of this, it seems things went back to normal:



I guess it's still early days so maybe the internet isn't stable yet.