Poor first impressions
I've been a plusnet fibre customer for two days and it's not going well.
1: they forgot to send me a router. I was on holiday and when I returned on thursday the open reach engineer was here (as arranged) but my router hadn't turned up! When I rang customer services they simply hadn't sent one. The first person I spoke to also told me that my broadband line wasn't active and I wouldn't have any internet anyway. 45 minutes later I finally got put through to someone who told me the line was working and helped me set up a hard wired connection from one of my laptops (but with no connection to my other devices)
2: restricted upload speed. My wired speedtest is now 34Mbps down but a mere 1.6 Mbps upload. When I ordered the product the speedtest showed 7Mbps up! Now on these forums I have seen the messages about a 2Mbps cap but I have not yet found where on the website this is mentioned when ordering. I realise it's going to be in the small print somewhere but as the result wasn't restricted to 2Mbps in the speed test it strongly implies 7Mbps would be available. I was hoping to use more online cloud services but 1.6Mbps upload puts a bit of a dampner on that!
3: terrible wifi performance from the router. While waiting for the wifi router to arrive I used Connectify on my laptop to get wifi to my other devices. I did a speed test and got 20Mbps over the wifi - perfectly adequate. The router has now arrived. After I set it up (see complaint number 4) I did a speedtest and I still get 34Mbps over wired but a mere 1.8Mbps over wifi! The router appears to be the cheapest of netgears current offerings. I haven't played with the wifi settings yet so maybe I can get it going faster.
4: automatic router configuration failed - instructions incorrect. The instructions for the router say 'plug-in and wait 15 minutes'. I did this. Then when I tried to browse the internet I was redirected to a plusnet page asking for user name and password. I but these in and it said 'this may take up to 10 minutes'. No mention of this in the intructions. Another 15 minutes later I got fed up and put my user name and password in the router manually.
The upload speed issue is probably the most serious. The wifi speed / cheap router issue is bugging me too. It seems BT infinity customers get better upload speeds (and the Home Hub is probably better than this netgear). If I can confirm the upload speed is better I think I'll be off...
1: they forgot to send me a router. I was on holiday and when I returned on thursday the open reach engineer was here (as arranged) but my router hadn't turned up! When I rang customer services they simply hadn't sent one. The first person I spoke to also told me that my broadband line wasn't active and I wouldn't have any internet anyway. 45 minutes later I finally got put through to someone who told me the line was working and helped me set up a hard wired connection from one of my laptops (but with no connection to my other devices)
2: restricted upload speed. My wired speedtest is now 34Mbps down but a mere 1.6 Mbps upload. When I ordered the product the speedtest showed 7Mbps up! Now on these forums I have seen the messages about a 2Mbps cap but I have not yet found where on the website this is mentioned when ordering. I realise it's going to be in the small print somewhere but as the result wasn't restricted to 2Mbps in the speed test it strongly implies 7Mbps would be available. I was hoping to use more online cloud services but 1.6Mbps upload puts a bit of a dampner on that!
3: terrible wifi performance from the router. While waiting for the wifi router to arrive I used Connectify on my laptop to get wifi to my other devices. I did a speed test and got 20Mbps over the wifi - perfectly adequate. The router has now arrived. After I set it up (see complaint number 4) I did a speedtest and I still get 34Mbps over wired but a mere 1.8Mbps over wifi! The router appears to be the cheapest of netgears current offerings. I haven't played with the wifi settings yet so maybe I can get it going faster.
4: automatic router configuration failed - instructions incorrect. The instructions for the router say 'plug-in and wait 15 minutes'. I did this. Then when I tried to browse the internet I was redirected to a plusnet page asking for user name and password. I but these in and it said 'this may take up to 10 minutes'. No mention of this in the intructions. Another 15 minutes later I got fed up and put my user name and password in the router manually.
The upload speed issue is probably the most serious. The wifi speed / cheap router issue is bugging me too. It seems BT infinity customers get better upload speeds (and the Home Hub is probably better than this netgear). If I can confirm the upload speed is better I think I'll be off...
or type "broadband upload speeds" into PNs own search window at the top of the page 
Quote 1: they forgot to send me a router
I'm not sure what you were told by us over the phone but it's not that we forgot. Due to an issue at the warehouse last week we were temporarily out of stock. That issue has been resolved so apologies all the same for the delay.
Quote 2: restricted upload speed.
We'd never try to give a false impression as we do advertise the upload speed of our fibre products as 2mb. This should be changing to facilitate faster upload speeds in the future though.
Quote terrible wifi performance from the router
Does your PC/wireless adapter support wireless N? it sounds like it might not which could be a cause of the slower speeds.
Quote 4: automatic router configuration failed
Personally I'm not fully aware of exactly what the instructions advise so I'd need to look into that, apologies if you feel mislead in any way.
Quote If I can confirm the upload speed is better I think I'll be off...
We're disappointed to hear that, please let us know if there's anything else we can help with
Thanks for the responses Adam.
The first advisor simply told me the router hadn't been sent out and promptly had it dispatched. Later the tech support advisor told me they were out of stock. But I did place the order a long time ago (I asked for installation to be delayed as I was out of the country). And a router should have been dispatched as soon as they were back in stock rather than waiting until I rang up to complain. At least it was promptly dispatched at that point
My equipment is wireless N. I guess it's just compatibility as I have now dialled the router back to 54Mbps max and get around 20Mbps to the wireless devices which is acceptable.
It is the upload speed that is most annoying though. As one poster has mentioned if you use the search box you can find the 2Mbps restriction but it's not there in front of you. When you're just typing in your phone number and you can see the figures 34Mbps down and 7Mbps up it does not immediately occur to you to start searching the web site for the actual upload speed.
In contrast if you look at the BT product page it has 'upto 2Mbps' written against the standard Infinity package and 'upto 10Mbps' against the unlimited infinity package.
I have not made my mind up to change just yet. I like how PlusNet is up front about the bandwidth limits at certain times of day (and I believe 10Mbps streaming is enough to watch an HD movie at 8pm) whereas BT don't make any mention of it. It would help if you could give some timescale on the upload speed.
The first advisor simply told me the router hadn't been sent out and promptly had it dispatched. Later the tech support advisor told me they were out of stock. But I did place the order a long time ago (I asked for installation to be delayed as I was out of the country). And a router should have been dispatched as soon as they were back in stock rather than waiting until I rang up to complain. At least it was promptly dispatched at that point
My equipment is wireless N. I guess it's just compatibility as I have now dialled the router back to 54Mbps max and get around 20Mbps to the wireless devices which is acceptable.
It is the upload speed that is most annoying though. As one poster has mentioned if you use the search box you can find the 2Mbps restriction but it's not there in front of you. When you're just typing in your phone number and you can see the figures 34Mbps down and 7Mbps up it does not immediately occur to you to start searching the web site for the actual upload speed.
In contrast if you look at the BT product page it has 'upto 2Mbps' written against the standard Infinity package and 'upto 10Mbps' against the unlimited infinity package.
I have not made my mind up to change just yet. I like how PlusNet is up front about the bandwidth limits at certain times of day (and I believe 10Mbps streaming is enough to watch an HD movie at 8pm) whereas BT don't make any mention of it. It would help if you could give some timescale on the upload speed.