Plusnet, pros and cons?

mrputney08

I'm currently not on the internet at home, I'm considering going with Plusnet at £6.49 per month. The initial payment of roughly £11 (this is for p&p for the wireless router) then £6.49 p.m after that seems reasonable. I've already paid in January a year's line rental up front with BT so just interested in internet access for now.
I'd be interested to know what consumers experiences are with them, good or bad. Thanks in advance.

spannerzone

Good experiences here, been with them 18 months and had a 99.5% reliable service and on the one occasion a glitch occured their UK customer service team answered quickly and were fairly helpful (the fault was a BT exchange fault it transpired)

So yes, I'd recommend them, in fact I have done twice to relatives.

Of course as with all internet providers, many will have had problems and many will have not..... there's not one ISP that seems to be significantly better than all the others unless you perhaps pay a lot more money. Just remember for the cheapest plusnet package you get a 10Gb download limit (peaktime) a month and BBC iplayer can clock up 0.5Gb for an hours viewing roughly speaking and you also have to be in one of Plusnet suitable areas to get the cheapest prices and not all areas are covered.

Wammer

Been with them for a year and no problems. The service is reliable and the speeds are much better than I was getting with Pipex.

Easy to get hold of someone on the phone. I called when I couldn't access one evening and the phone was answered promptly. It turned out that most of the country couldn't get internet access that evening as it was a major outage so I was surprised I managed to speak to someone so quickly when there must have been tens of thousands of people all calling their ISP's.

Unfortunately I am in a Market 1 area so pay full price, but think it is worth it for reliably I would like better speeds, but that is down to the distance from the exchange and not Plusnet.

macman

The £6.49 price only applies if you are on a Market 3 exchange, and as mentioned above Plusnet Value is a capped 10GB package-but that's probably fine for you as an internet newbie.
Makes sure that you apply through Quidco to get the £28 casback, that'll effectively give you 4 months free.

Squire_Fulwood

My experience has, mostly, been good since their rules suit me. I communicate using video mail, stream TV programs etc and generally use a lot of data. The package I have with them allows a generous 60GB per month but any traffic between midnight and 8am is free and does not count towards my limit.

When I first joined them "someone" entered incorrect information in the direct debit details which took a bit of sorting but that has been the only glitch so far.

I am happy to recommend them.

cannyshopper_2

I've been with them about 2 years & I'm very happy with them. I'm on the basic package which gives me 10GB a month, I find this quite adequate. Speeds are capped slightly at peak times but I do not find this a problem (at least they are honest about doing this, unlike some other providers). The service is very reliable.

Their Customer Service is excellent. After a trouble-free 6 months with decent speeds (I'm limited to 4MB due to my distance from the exchange) I started experiencing very slow speeds & sometimes it wouldn't connect at all. It took some sorting out - I tried everything I knew of at my end to locate the source of the problem. They put a monitor on my line & checked it for a couple of weeks then sent me a new router. It turned out to be a neighbour's new setup interfering with my wireless connection, and I had to set a different channel. The CS rep was very patient with me and talked me through it. Its been fine ever since. I liked being able to talk to someone who spoke English as his first language LOL, it definitely makes things easier! I never had a problem getting through to them on the phone.

The free usage between midnight & 8am is useful if you are a night owl or early riser - you can download your TV programs etc without worrying about going over your limit.

You also get a small discount of 25p off your monthly bill if you recommend a friend. You can get this for everyone who signs up, I don't think its capped.

I have no hesitation in recommending them.

spannerzone

Good call about Quidco and referrals... I forgot to mention that I signed my mum for Plusnet and then discovered I'd been given 3 months free Plusnet as a referral offer they were doing at the time, earlier this year. I pay £17.99 a month as I'm out of their lower priced areas so I got 3 months for free so most happy.

Ben84

We were with plusnet for about a year. We changed supplier after that to take advantage of the faster fibre optic lines being installed by virgin media.

We found Plusnet had good customer service and the speed we were getting was pretty good for broadband through the existing telephone wiring (approaching the maximum our telephone line was able to support).

Only small trouble we had was that our local telephone exchange does not have plusnet's equipment installed (or most other ISPs either), so we had to rent the line from BT and paid a slightly higher price for the plusnet internet because they had to resell us BT internet. It was still, oddly enough, much cheaper than BT internet though.

Our local telephone exchange is pretty antiquated, but we're probably not the only area with this problem so it's worth telephoning them to ask if their services are available at your local exchange.

Pont

I'm OK with them too.
If you're capped to 10GB just watch out as you approach your limit. They will automatically add another £5 to your bill if you go a swidge over unless you physically limit your spend via your homepage.

macman

Ben84 wrote: »

We were with plusnet for about a year. We changed supplier after that to take advantage of the faster fibre optic lines being installed by virgin media.

We found Plusnet had good customer service and the speed we were getting was pretty good for broadband through the existing telephone wiring (approaching the maximum our telephone line was able to support).

Only small trouble we had was that our local telephone exchange does not have plusnet's equipment installed (or most other ISPs either), so we had to rent the line from BT and paid a slightly higher price for the plusnet internet because they had to resell us BT internet. It was still, oddly enough, much cheaper than BT internet though.

Our local telephone exchange is pretty antiquated, but we're probably not the only area with this problem so it's worth telephoning them to ask if their services are available at your local exchange.

Plusnet does not have any LLU exchanges, it's available on every exchange in the UK. All their services are resold BT Wholesale ones. However, the broadband price is cheaper on a Market 3 exchange because the wholesale price they pay to BT is cheaper. Being on a Market 1 exchange, unfortunately you pay the higher rate. This does not prevent you from taking your line rental from Plusnet if you wish.

Muhasib

Its not been mentioned but isn't there a £25 activation fee as well if you only get the broadband?