ISP services Hardware Plusnet provides
asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL/VDSL)
broadband and full fibre broadband products to residential and business customers. They are supplied with the Hub Two, a re-branded version of the
BT Smart Hub 2 with a modified user interface. Plusnet previously provided two variants of router: the Plusnet Hub Zero (
Sagemcom 2704n) router with its ADSL packages, and the Plusnet Hub One (a rebadged
BT Hub 5) with its
fibre packages.
Network capacity Plusnet was one of the first ISPs in the UK to use network
quality of service (QoS) techniques, which it introduced in November 2004, in order to control the finite data bandwidth available to them at peak times. This move was a reaction to the cost of bandwidth, £210 per Mbit/s per month in November 2006 for ISPs using the
BT Wholesale network. Critics have suggested that the decision to employ QoS on the network was driven by Plusnet's focus on delivering to tight profit targets dictated by investors during the time when they were a
public limited company (plc). Plusnet replaced its QoS technique with a Sustainable Usage Policy (SUP) in 2005. In 2007, around the time of acquisition by BT, an additional 930 Mbit/s of data bandwidth was made available by adding six
BT IPStream segments to the network. This additional capacity has brought the Plusnet total broadband network capacity to 22 155 Mbit/s
BT Central segments. This is delivered over five full 622 Mbit/s BT Centrals (four 155 Mbit/s in each BT Central) and two BT Centrals with one segment of 155 Mbit/s active in each. This services a total of just over 200,000 customers at October 2007. This total data bandwidth figure is only slightly higher than Plusnet's capacity in January 2005, before Plusnet used Network QoS, when they had a total of seventeen segments (ten 155 Mbit/s Centrals and seven segments delivered over two 622 Mbit/s pipes) and 100,000 customers. At that time, there was an imbalance on their network as a result of issues that are caused from using a mixture of pipes. In February 2005, Plusnet reduced to a total of sixteen segments delivered over five 622 Mbit/s pipes (622s are slightly more efficient than 155 Meg segments, so this allowed for a similar amount of throughput). In August 2005, Plusnet was forced through contractual obligation to upgrade to seventeen segments, and in January 2006, moved to eighteen segments. Plusnet's acquisition of Parbin Ltd in November 2005; with 16,000 customers and three 155 Mbit/s segments gave Plusnet a total of twenty-one segments. However, Plusnet absorbed all of these new customers and decommissioned the three segments, bringing them back to eighteen segments. This was further reduced by two segments, bringing it to sixteen in total – at around the same time as nearly 20,000 customers were moved to the
Tiscali local-loop unbundling (LLU) network in July 2006. There is controversy that the last two segments should not have been removed. Particularly as at that time, Plusnet increased allowances on all the residential packages. When this contradiction was exposed in December 2006, Plusnet defended their actions, but the explanation given was not positively received by the community at the time. Plusnet reported that the slowdown in the increase of capacity from January 2005 was due to two major reasons. The introduction of their lower cost, lower capacity allowance, broadband product; which many existing customers moved to, and the introduction of Network QoS and the general network management policy to combat the spiralling usage of a small portion (around 1%) of the customer base. However, it was not fully explained how Plusnet expected to deliver the performance of their broadband packages to 180,000 customers on the same capacity as they had when they only had 100,000 customers.
Usage restrictions Plusnet has, on a number of occasions, redefined their product usage guidelines in order to reflect changes in overall customer usage or in the costs they incur from their suppliers. This has resulted in customers being asked to restrict their usage, upgrade to a different product, or leave the company entirely. This practice has become common within the ISP market in the UK and is generally accepted, however Plusnet has sometimes made these changes without warning or notice to their customers. Plusnet has argued that the changes made didn't require any notice to be given because they don't consider them to form part of the legal
contract with the consumer. Plusnet is one of the few UK ISPs to publish a full breakdown of its wholesale costs, as part of the Plusnet Broadband Blueprint document.
Deep packet inspection and bandwidth management Plusnet used to make heavy use of traffic prioritisation (this ended in 2017) to maintain a stable service. Plusnet acknowledges on their website how network QoS impacts individual protocols and as a result what experience they expect the end-user to receive. This broadband experience is subject to periodic changes without notice in order to preserve the quality of network performance for the protocols that demand extremely low latency. Customers are notified of changes by checking Plusnet's website, freephone telephone number or RSS feed. The use of
Arbor Networks E30 Ellacoya platform to perform traffic fingerprinting using
deep packet inspection and
Juniper Networks ERX switches to perform protocol shaping has seen a situation where all protocols, including encrypted P2P traffic are identified and managed on their network. Plusnet's position is that this prioritisation is in place to ensure time-critical applications like
VoIP, gaming, browsing and video streaming (from sites like
YouTube) are prioritised above applications that would otherwise swamp their available network capacity to the detriment of other customers' broadband experience.
File sharing applications and binary
Usenet are the most heavily managed protocols on Plusnet's network, and are collectively treated as low priority on most of their consumer products. Plusnet announced that as of 29 July 2017, traffic prioritisation was to be removed from its residential customers.
Identification of traffic Deliberate traffic shaping is deployed on the Plusnet network in order to ensure QoS. Mistakes when this system was first implemented resulted in misclassification of some protocols, which made certain applications unusable at peak times. This was improved when the classification of unidentified traffic was raised in priority. Non-standard applications still remain susceptible to misclassification (e.g. running SSH on a non standard port other than 4500 or 10000 which are set aside by Plusnet for this purpose). Continual improvements in protocol identification along with a significant increase in available bandwidth mean that the implementation is generally considered to be working successfully.
IPv6 support , Plusnet did not in general provide
IPv6 connectivity to its customers, but were trialling IPv6 with selected customers. In December 2013, Plusnet started its "Next Phase" IPv6 trial. Participating in this trial required the participants to provide and reconfigure their own IPv6-compatible routers. The trial was active from December 2013, but is closed for new applicants. Plusnet had earlier run a small trial with real end-users for
World IPv6 Day in June 2011, with both their website and broadband customers on IPv6 on that day. The first IPv6 broadband user "technical trial" ran until July 2012.
Virtual ISPs Plusnet has operated a number of "Virtual ISP" brands, both for its own company and for others. These alternative brands use the Plusnet network and software infrastructure. These brands include: • BT One Enterprise Connect and BT One Enterprise broadband –
BT Global Services utilise their own Workplace platform within their Teleworker product, to deliver remote broadband access for its major corporate customers • Plusnet supports the legacy
Vodafone@Home service, after around 8,000 Vodafone customers were migrated to the Plusnet brand on 7 February 2012. == Former services ==