Why were the new restrictions on upload added?

[#1]

Yeah, the 40/20 product that I believe 55/10 customers were provisioned on was pretty much the wholesale 80/20 capped to 40 by our systems.

The 40/2 product for Unlimited Fibre on isn't a bandwidth problem. It's the product that we're selling to our customers.

[#2]

What game requires a 5Mb upload? I can't think of anything that requires that. Most games you could run quite happily on a 3Mb ADSL connection with 0.3 upload.

The main issue is downloading patches with how big they are these days.

2Mbit is faster upload than the fastest uncapped ADSL.

Games need a lot less bandwidth than people think they need.

The 40/20 plusnet product was just the 80/20 wholesale product capped on plusnets end. 55/10 is a different wholesale product that came out later.

[#3]

Ok so then it wasn't in fact a wholesale that reduced the bandwidth it was Plusnet that decided to end their 40/20 and move their customers on to 55/10 package instead. Fine, why did they decide to do that then? Surely in terms of competition they were at an advantage over the competition because they offered a better package? Now they just offer the same as everyone else....

Plus the big issue has been that people that went from 40/20 to 55/10 often ended up with lower syncs for both download and upload than they had prior to the change.

Just makes no sense to me why they would want to lower their packages. I am still waiting for them to lower the 80/20 to 80/2 mbit....

Plus since the change my 80/20 is more like 55/15 if i am lucky and i am sure many others who don't take the time to moan about it out there and that is not a line restriction because I have got 80/20 on this line before... So just a lack of bandwidth available in general and over subscription.

[#4]

It is nothing to do with bandwidth restriction it was reducing costs as 40/20 costs Plusnet the same as 80/20 and 55/10 is cheaper

[#5]

@ScottStorey people would be surprised how modern games use the internet , i play BF4/ BF1  but then i also run Teamspeak , BF1 now also requires connection to EA cloud  for the  game .

But then like most households i have a smart TV connected , A tablet , Laptop , 2 phones , and son on his PS4 with VoIP

The point is one individual connection may not max your 2 upload , but all together well we can just wait and see

[#6]

Doing 80:2 would still mean paying btw for a 80:20 so offering that would help no one. 40:2 saves users money and plusnet money

Btw offer price deals every now and then so suspect plusnet got a deal on 80:20 and took that but will want of offer tiers of service so still had a 40 and 80

Example is now look at the btw price list google it - and there are offers on people on < 10mb adsl to fttc. That might push more marketing to some users for special offers by plusnet and other isps etc.

I also don't think most households are multi use. A lot are yes but of all the target markets families with kids and lots of high tech devices, tablets. PS4s smart TVs etc won't do well on 2mb but are also less sensitive to price so are more likely to pay for the top package or another more expensive isp that also gives wifi, cloud storage etc.

He products plusnet sell will have gone through market research and segmentation based on the sectors plusnet are aiming at, and that may well be deliberately not focusing on users who are more likely to go to BT for example.

[#7]

@Gregg "Networks are usually full duplex. Well at least networks from this century. There is no cost associated with network equipment being used, outside of running costs like electricity and rack costs."

Full duplex means send and receive at he same time, I assume you mean though symmetric bandwidth, e.g. A 100mbit lan is same bandwidth in both directions.

The reason to why not is the lengths and cable are different for broadband than a lan, e.g they also carry phone too.

To make it all work some of the upload and download use different frequencies on the line. To make the best consumer service most want more dl than upload so the frequencies used by BT and most others around the world give more dl than upload, say 80:20 vs 50:50 product.

Sdsl was I think the only dsl that gave same speed each way in the uk iirc but was sold only as 2mb each way.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-high-bit-rate_digital_subscriber_line Has some nice diagrams to show the chunks of frequencies.

[#8]

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@rongtw wrote:

So PN are just being Lemmings following all ISP.

where did Management go wrong

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PN are being like lemmings here yes I agree - and what when wrong with management?  the PN management clearly have limited vision.  They are in effect saying we can't offer a better option because TalkTalk don't.   So where is the competition to the benefit of customers there?  

As many of us have said in other threads PN could offer an alternative OPTION either the 40/10 or the 55/10 as a middle ground option and charge accordingly.  The 40/10 option costs PN £1 more per month than the 40/2.

This was they could still do their lemming act and directly compete with TT on the 40/2 option AND get more revenue from those that would elect for a higher upload.

Note the 2 Mb/s upload these two ISPs offer is just over half of the national average according to Ofcom for upload!

We have asked PN to comment why they will not offer a middle tier offering, but so far silence on this.   Maybe because they are embarrassed to admit they just follow an ISP like TT

It's no surprise they PN came out as one of the lowest ISPs rated for customer satisfaction, and they are doing little, if anything, to change that.

[#9]

Plusnet dont care about customer satisfaction !! All the management want is to increase numbers with daft free offers 😞

[#10]

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@Gregg wrote:

Plus since the change my 80/20 is more like 55/15 if i am lucky and i am sure many others who don't take the time to moan about it out there and that is not a line restriction because I have got 80/20 on this line before... So just a lack of bandwidth available in general and over subscription.

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PN do not have any network capacity issues. I get full speed (63/18.5) all day every day.

What you have there is some kind of line fault (including the possibility of local exchange congestion). You should report it to PN so that they can fix it. What does the availability checker say for your line?

[#11]

@Gregg what does your line sync at? If it's syncing at 80:20 and you are getting 55:15 then yes that's slow but without the sync speed it's hard to comment.

Also google btw Speedtest and run that including the test 3 that shows if it's pn or btw with the congestion.

Mine is pretty much running at 78 at peak times no network slowdown so like @Andrue not getting general pn slowdown.

[#12]

It's peak time and I ain't not got no slow down

PN's customer service is dire and recently their network had random issues for some users on some routes (possibly, maybe fixed now) but their network does not have capacity issues. Anyone getting slower speeds than they'd expect should consider it a fault and report it. Living with it and getting all worked up and whiny about it won't help. Reporting it probably will.