Plusnet offers upgrade to Max Premium
Tuesday 18 March 2008 06:13:48 by Andrew Ferguson
As people embrace their broadband connection and start to do more with it they slowly find out that the speed of the upstream side is critical to many tasks, for example the time it takes to upload a photo to a website.
Plusnet is giving people the chance to upgrade from the rate adaptive 448Kbps upstream connection speed of a BT Wholesale Max product to the rate adaptive 832Kbps maximum speed that Max Premium offers. This free upgrade will last for three months at the end of which people will be automatically billed an extra £8 a month on top of their usual subscription fee (Max Premium is £5.88 more than Max at the wholesale level). Full details of this offer that is only running until 31st March 2008 is on the Plusnet website.
If at the end of the free period you decide to switch back to the standard Max upstream of 448Kbps this is free to do so.
While the vast majority of people on a Max product do connect at 448Kbps it should be remembered that the upstream is rate adaptive so some people will not see the full 832Kbps connection speede, but a lower figure that will vary as the modem adapts to the line conditions. The upstream speed on ADSL should not adversely affect the downstream connection rate, but in some conditions pushing the upstream speed to its absolute limit may result in more line drops as the modem adapts to line conditions. ADSL2+ Annex M which a small number of providers do offer does have a trade off between upstream and downstream speeds.
To give an idea of the difference the change in upstream speed will make, a 3 MegaByte (MB) file would upload in around 65 seconds, but under Max Premium this would reduce to around 33 seconds.
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Ive always in a way admired Plusnet, personally i wouldnt join them just cos their services they offer would not suit my style of use, but they are upfront about limits on what to expect from the service. They also seem to be offering good ideas, a couple of months back they gave Pipex customers shelter with a special offer and now this, excellent thinking Plusnet, may have had your bashers in the past but it looks like this leopard has changed its spots, or atleast a few of them :)
I recently left PlusNet for BE* unlimited because of the upstream limitation. BE* gives me at least 1Mbps upstream and 7+Mbps downstream, all for 14 pounds. All LLU providers give a higher upstream bandwidth as far as I know compared with BT wholesale based providers. BE* is still a much cheaper option than PlusNet- if your exchange is enabled...
I've been with Plusnet for around 3 years now & my only gripe is the chargeable help line. Having said that, I've never had to ring it thanks to the reliability of connection, so it's not the biggest worry in my life. I consistently get around 6.8 Mbps download & 380 Kpbs upload speeds so that also is more than acceptable as I don't live any where near the exchange.
Seems like a fair premium to get the fast upstream and exchange priority in case of congestion.