Hi everyone,
just posting here because PlusNet don't have a way of opening a ticket other than through a text message. Which I suppose is a novel way of keeping your ticket numbers down. I've sent a text and despite the bot not finding my postcode it says I need to speak to an advisor which I'll do in the morning. Anyhow, snark aside, here's my issue -
I had a fibre connection installed today to replace the ADSL connection - and to be honest it's been nothing but trouble so far.
The big problem is that connections to website and services are so, so slow. It can take upwards of three minutes to make a connection. Subsequent connections are usually pretty quick - except for sites that you would expect to use load balancing which can still take several minutes - which would imply that the issue is with DNS resolution and that when the IP is cached the connections are therefore quicker.
Sometimes I'll get errors that the connection has timed out, others that the name cannot be resolved. It can often take several attempts to access a site or service.
To give you some examples (and to show that the issue isn't with my kit) -
Smart TV, connected via a wired connection. iPlayer, ITVX and All4 all time out / freeze / never connect. Spotify does connect, as does Amazon Prime but the latter will drop the connection every now and then requiring you to go out and back into the film / football match you were watching.
Laptop, both on wired and wireless connection. First time connections - when there is no IP in the DNS cache - can take several minutes before a connection is made. www.bbc.co.uk/news for example can easily take 3+ minutes to make an initial connection. Websites may load, but if they're calling assets from another (sub) domain then they may not load as the connection times out before they're loaded. Outlook (desktop app) will take an age to collect or send email, often just gets stuck at the 'Updating folder' for a while. Spotify (desktop app) works ok, but it does cache most, if not all, of a track.
Mobile, wireless. The web browser shows the same issues as the laptop. Apps on the phone are very hit and miss. Twitter will work, but will more often then not fail to load any images. Bluesky doesn't load at all. Outlook doesn't throw any errors - but that's an Outlook on mobile thing - but will take a while to update.
DNS on the hub (the PlusNet Hub 2) is set to auto, but even if I change it to use CloudFlare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4) the same issues occur.
Looking at what's manifesting it almost looks like PlusNet doing severe rate limiting against port 53 for DNS. Whether you are or not, the issue is with either the PlusNet systems or the hub.
Speaking of the hub, initially it wouldn't connect (static orange light) and the Openreach engineer pointed the figure at PlusNet. However, when I've logged into the web portal to check the settings I noticed that the credentials on the device we not for my account. There was also indications that other devices had been connected to it, including a Kingston USB memory stick. I'm not overly fussed about getting a bit of 'pre-owned' equipment, but I would've expected that it would have been reset before being sent out.
Anyone had anything similar with their connections? Would a factory reset of the hub help?
