Re: Escape from Tiscali

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005, Marc B wrote:

> I've signed up for Plusnet's BroadbandPAYG as my use of the internet
> is limited to a little light www surfing, newsgroups, ocassional
> email and accessing work from home. I don't intend to stream video,
> download the entire iTunes catalogue or use P2P file sharing! As
> long as I get decent download speed when I need it I'll be happy.

In my experience with an analogous Plusnet tariff and usage profile,
you'll generally do just fine. For Usenet, I had to switch from their
main usenet server to their text-only server (text.usenet.plus.net) to
get any meaningful response, although this might have changed since -
they've evidently been doing quite a bit of tweaking. Also, the other
night I found "Google Earth" responding very sluggishly, although I
can't be sure whether this was Plusnet throttling the streaming data,
or Google itself being overloaded.

On the whole, I'm reasonably satisfied with my choice of Plusnet. I'm
glad that they're pissing-off the hardcore of users who've been trying
to get far more than their fair share, though I admit they might have
done it in ways that brought them better PR.

Caveat: I haven't needed any technical support. Everything has "just
worked" for me, so I've no idea how good or bad they are when the ADSL
goes pear-shaped.

(As you can see, for the most part I'm using plusnet just as a network
access point to get access to my accustomed facilities on the campus -
via ssh, if you want to know. But the campus doesn't take all
newsgroups, so I do also use the plusnet usenet service for some
groups.)
.

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