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PlusNet Broadband
PlusNet (www.Plus.net) won the prestigious Best Consumer ISP award at the 2008 ISPA awards for its home broadband service and also came top of the BroadbandChoices.co.uk customer satisfaction survey in March 2008, with 79 per cent of customers satisfied with their broadband service.
A provider that doesn’t believe in offering “unlimited” broadband that isn’t really unlimited, all PlusNet packages have set download limits, but customers can download as much as they want overnight without it affecting their allowance.
PlusNet started out in 1997 offering dial-up and speeds of up to 56Kb, going on to develop a loyal customer base of more than 200,000 and offer home phone services, VoIP and wifi.
In January 2007 PlusNet was bought by BT (www.BT.com) and is now run as an independent subsidiary, continuing to win awards for its broadband products and customer service alike.
PlusNet broadband
PlusNet offers four home broadband products as well as a dedicated gamer’s tariff to reduce ping and lag, and improve its customer’s online gaming experience.
The home broadband products all come with download speeds of up to 8Mb, but price and download allowances range from £9.99 a month with a 1GB allowance on Option 1, £14.99 a month with an 8GB allowance on Option 2, £19.99 a month with a 20GB allowance on Option 3 and £24.99 a month with a 40GB allowance on Option 4.
All customers can download as much as they want overnight and can also buy additional usage for 75p per GB if it’s bought in advance or £1 per GB if you just pay as you use it.
If you know you don’t want to buy any extra you can also set a price limit. This means that once you reach your monthly limit your connection will be reduced to 128Kb until the end of the billing month and you won’t be able to use any peer-to-peer or downloading sites until your allowance tops up again.
PlusNet’s gaming tariff, Broadband Your Way Pro costs £19.99 a month and has a speed of up to 8Mb, a 10GB download allowance and all gaming traffic is prioritised to reduce ping and latency. It also comes with a free wireless router and £40 of Game vouchers.
Traffic shaping
PlusNet’s traffic shaping depends on the package that you take. Those on the more expansive tariffs will experience fewer restrictions during peak hours than those on cheaper packages.
The Pro gaming package has no restrictions to gaming servers, peer-to-peer networks, or any other type of download site at any time and restrictions then vary down to Option 1 which has restrictions slowing downloads on peer-to-peer, binary usenet, and external FTP sites at all times, then download sites and download servers between 4pm and midnight. Nothing else is restricted though so all normal browsing and internet traffic would still run at the highest speed possible.
Awards & accreditations
PlusNet has won a host of awards, and so far this year has already taken home the Best Consumer ISP award at the 2008 ISPA awards and was a runner up for the Best Business Broadband award and the Best Business ISP awards.
It also came top of the BroadbandChoices.co.uk customer satisfaction survey in March 2008, with 79 per cent of customers satisfied with their broadband service and was ranked top in 9 out of 11 categories customer support categories in a uSwitch.com survey.
And these are just the latest in a string of awards in recent years.
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