Wednesday 8 June 2011

Plus Net vs Demon Internet as Broadband providers

We now after some work have established a stable broadband internet service for PlusNet at our business. We use this as a back-up service to the Demon Internet business Broadband internet. Both have approximately the same monthly price and both are posted as unlimited business bandwidth. They are both delivered from the same exchange in Deptford London.

The PlusNet service delivers about 4 Meg of bandwidth incoming (ping time for sip.skype.com is 40 msec). The Demon service delivers about double the incoming bandwidth at just under 8 Mbs with a ping time of 30msec.  Internet browsing is noticeably quicker on the Demon Internet service.  Both services seem to be stable.

We had some jerky playback of video with the Plusnet feed. Following discussion on the support forum and their support staff we were able to track down the cause. We found some pirate wiring for an extension on the BT side of the phone master socket. It was about 20 metres long but not actually connected to anything. A couple of snips removed the connection and our problems were ended. So far as we can tell the old extension wiring was installed over 25 years ago by previous occupants of the building.

We are growing increasingly impressed with the PlusNet support staff. They are as a rule helpful, but we've encountered a couple who were not up to par.

In general Demon are more business like in their approach, but PlusNet seem to be getting there. The PlusNet approach to IPv6 trials is encouraging.

Update (March 2012 - 9 months later)
We found the cause of the speed difference; mostly it was due to PlusNet starting us on the basic ADSL service whereas Demon had gone to ADSL Max. Now fixed. One other cause of line errors (speed) was tracked done to an illegal extension wiring installed by the previous property owner some 25 years ago. They'd wired in an extension on the BT side of the phone socket - difficult to find. 

Update (April 2012)
One really annoying shortcoming of the PlusNet Business Option 3 service which is touted as unlimited is that they throttle video feeds in the evening. The service gives us a monthly tab of about £43 a month with enhanced help desk response service. It is a bit silly they choose to  be niggardly with the video feed. We quite often work on in the evening, particularly with USA clients, having jerky video in the evening can be a right PITA. We've set Plus Net for use only as a back up service and rely on Demon for the main stream.
 

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