Plusnet Announce Bandwidth "Cap"

[daniel_owen_uk]

Free speed upgrades to all PlusNet customers.

Following BT’s recent announcement to increase Broadband speeds up to 8Mb across their local exchange network, PlusNet is delighted to offer free speed upgrades and a brand new product range.

From April, all PlusNet customers will be able to take advantage of the increased speeds as they become available. Existing PlusNet customers will be able to upgrade free of charge to the maximum available DSL speed. BT is working hard to ensure that as many people as possible are able to receive the maximum available speeds. Further, BT Wholesale’s changes enable the ISP to determine its customers’ actual speed setting, instead of this being set at BT's local exchange.

Upgrades to all fixed cost broadband product speeds

Premier customers will be able to choose the speed they wish to operate their connection at, from 512kb right up to 8Mb where available.

The Premier product range offers a clean DSL connection with no network restrictions or traffic shaping applied, enabling customers to run whatever applications they need to, at any time of the day, with no worries about speed or performance. In conjunction with this, PlusNet is implementing its “fair usage” policy in which it will deliver a commitment to its customers, ensuring platform performance is not disproportionately affected by a small minority of extremely heavy users.

Broadband Premier Fair Usage Total “Fair Usage” Achievable
Product On Peak Levels Inc Off Peak (based on 2Mb)
£21.99 30GB 230GB
£29.99 50GB 250GB
£39.99 75GB 275GB
£49.99 100GB 300GB
£59.99 125GB 325GB

The above table shows how prices relate to usage, rather than speed. Usage between 1am through 8am is excluded from “fair usage” levels, so if a customer schedules their downloads ‘off-peak’ they can achieve a far higher usage with no restrictions. Further, only download data is monitored, uploads are not restricted in any way.

Speed increases for PAYG products

PlusNet’s Broadband PAYG products, formerly known as “Lite”, will also be extended to include 4 and 8Mb speeds from April. At £14.99 per month, and £1.50 per GB thereafter, speeds of up to 8Mb will be a fantastic value product option for light and infrequent Broadband users.

Introducing Broadband Plus

Broadband Plus will be available from April. This product range will complement the existing Broadband Pay As You Go and Premier products, and will offer unrivalled price value. Broadband Plus is designed to meet the needs of the average Broadband user, looking for fast email and web browsing, with more advanced applications being more suitable on the Broadband Pay As You Go and Premier products. A fair usage system does not need to apply to Broadband Plus due to the way the product is designed and network managed.

Broadband Plus has a lower service-providing cost than the Premier products, which will be reflected in the pricing PlusNet will publish for Broadband Plus in the near future.
Marketing Director, Marco Potesta commented “The next few months are going to be very exciting for PlusNet and our customers, 8Mb speeds for £14.99 per month on Broadband Pay As You Go takes some beating. Moving from 512k to 8Mb speeds on a premium package and continuing to pay just £21.99 is even better news.”

Potesta added “The Broadband market is very fragmented. There are loads of small ISPs offering different products and it’s very confusing from a price and service perspective. Through ‘Broadband Pay As You Go’, ‘Broadband Plus’ and ‘Broadband Premier’, PlusNet has 3 simple product options that offer something for everyone, delivering market leading value, quality of service and a fantastic customer experience.”

If you haven't bought broadband yet, wish to upgrade, or migrate please go to
http://www.plus.net

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Notes for Editors:
Product Information
4 & 8Mb speeds are subject to limited availability, during BT Wholesale trials.
Broadband Plus package will restrict the flow of P2P and Usenet activity heavily outside of 1am – 8am. This minimises the average cost per customer by lowering the amount of capacity used during peak times.
If users are happy to use P2P and Usenet off-peak, Broadband Plus will deliver a very low priced fast connection.
If fast peak time P2P and Usenet activity is required, the best choice is a Premier product.
Fair Usage Information
All ISPs sell Broadband with conditions that give them the right to prevent heavy users degrading speeds or quality of service of contended (shared) network capacity that affect other users.
PlusNet surveyed its customers to openly and honestly consult them on their views earlier this year.
PlusNet want to avoid hard caps, and did not want to target heavier users stealthily as they understand some customers require extreme levels of downloading occasionally.
The fair usage policy will prevent constant extreme heavy usage, month after month, and will not affect the high quality broadband experienced by 99% of PlusNet customers.
About PlusNet plc.
PlusNet plc (www.plus.net) has become well-known with the UK's web community for offering exceptional customer service and value-for-money - combining service reliability and outstanding support with some of the UK's lowest broadband prices.
PlusNet plc is a leading UK Internet service provider. Interim results for the nine months ended September 30 2004 showed turnover at £20.0 million (an increase of 65% from the same period in 2003).
In 2004 PlusNet was awarded Future Publishing's “Best Consumer ISP” and “Customer Service” awards.
PlusNet plc offers Broadband and Narrowband products and services to both residential and business users.
Further information about PlusNet plc may be found at the Company’s investor relations site: http://www.plus.net/investors/

Regards,

Dave Tomlinson
PlusNet Customer Support

Taking the **** if you ask me.

I have been going up the wall.

Just not on, especially for those contracted to an unlimited broadband account.

They have my email asking for a termination put it that way.

[Jonny M]

Have you seen the cap sizes though? Tell me you hit more than 250GB a month

[Apex]

Was only a matter of time before this came in.

This is the future, get use to it guys !

[midzt]

Is this the same as this:

http://www.plus.net/features/usage_g...8c5c73a7f189ca

I'm confused.

[daniel_owen_uk]

Have you seen the cap sizes though? Tell me you hit more than 250GB a month

75gb on peak, my usage is more than that yes.

[Xaneden]

This is only a teaser for what is to come. As more and more people use broadband (and more precisely, Peer to Peer), the ISPs are going to have to limit usage.

I admit, they've done it a bit sneakily. NTL for one, couldn't bring in a real cap to current users, as it wasn't in the original contract. However, now they are enhancing our speeds in 2 months time, its a new contract, and thus they can include this cap.

Its necessary, but bloody annoying.

[daniel_owen_uk]

I have read more and calmed down a little now, basically they only reduce your speed if you go over 3 months running and then they give you the option to go elsewhere regardless of contract length.

For me that basically means they release me from my contract now or I rape their network for as much as I can for 3 months then they release me

[malfunction]

75gb on peak, my usage is more than that yes.

How?

Are you the warez king?

[Jonny M]

I think once all ISPs introduce capping, it will become very clear that these Plusnet caps are huge when compared with other UK ISPs. The peak caps are larger than what most ISPs would quote as "fair use" for upload and download, and that's not even including the off-peak allowance.

Can't you schedule your downloading to be done off-peak?

[CocoPops]

Can't you schedule your downloading to be done off-peak?

Thats what I've just sorted out.

Throttled to 10kB download between 8am and 1am, but unthrottled for "offpeak"

[daniel_owen_uk]

Why should I have to? I didn't sign up for that.

I am fortunate enough to be in an LLU enabled area, so I can get 8mb for £40 a month with 500gb cap.

Just need to be released from my 12 month contract with plusnet, which I will do as soon as they respond to my ticket, only been waiting 40 hours.

[Jonny M]

I think the point is that it's going to something that all ISPs are going to implement at some stage, you can start jumping ship now, but eventually you will run out of (sensibly priced) options.

[daniel_owen_uk]

I agree that a lot of ISPs will do this, as a lot of ISPs have to reflect the pricing structure of BT wholesale, LLU however is not based on BT, so hopefully I should be ok for a while yet.

500GB any time, for me, is much much easier to live with than 75GB on peak.

Plusnet are sorting my MAC number out, took them a while and I am less than pleased with some of the response they have given me, but to be fair they are letting me go so I am slightly appeased.

[Apex]

Each to their own i guess, you knew caps where going to come in and now you moan about them.

btw it's not a cap it's called fair useage ie the ammount used is taken over 3 months stints.

[daniel_owen_uk]

No I didn't know caps were coming in, I signed up to an unlimited, contended service.

The idea of contention is that the more busy the network becomes the slower it goes, so why advertise the contention ratio and then stop people downloading large amounts as its affects the network? Everyone that signed up for that product should know it will affect the network, because its in the contract they signed.

What they are doing will, and there is no other way of saying this, limit the amount it is possible to download, only someone that has been told not to call that a cap would say it isn't a cap.

[Lee H]

How?

Are you the warez king?

I use more than that and 1 phase will say why....

"Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition 2005"

Music brigade alone can use up a good 2 Mb line when streaming videos to your PC in excellent quality.