OK so my last post told the story of my crappy broadband experience. However,every cloud has a silver lining.
Having had a pretty bad experience I decided it was time to check the market and see who was offering what in the broadband stakes. Now there are people who offer 8Mb or 16Mb or sometimes even 24Mb ADSL but as I don’t live in a telephone exchange such speeds are beyond the laws of physics for me. This means that speed isn’t really an issue,when people are comparing speeds they tend to be looking at 6Mb+ for an “8Mb”service,I can get no more than 4Mb and to be honest,2Mb is more likely. For me therefore I thought customer service,reliability and of course unlimited downloads were the crucial factors.
Having looked at the various comparison sites it seemed that Plusnet scored pretty highly in customer service and reliability and offered a truly unlimited service for about the same as I had been paying previously. Sounds too good to be true but I thought I’d sign up and see for myself.
The signup is all online. Now this shouldn’t be a surprise but the number of ISPs who insist in you phoning them to sign up is frankly shocking. Having filled in some fairly simple forms,all of which had helpful hints,I hit the “congratulations”page saying all was in order and that I’d be getting an email shortly. I did. In fact I got quite a few. After the congrats page I was taken to the account sign up status page which listed all the steps necessary to get me connected and an indicator showing where I currently was. I also go an email as every step completed. Not only was I being giving a running commentary but I also got all the really useful info,such as settings for my router to get me online,that I had to wait weeks for with my previous provider. In fact,the last two times I’ve needed to sort ADSL I’ve had to wait for a “welcome pack”which took two weeks to arrive.
An hour later and I had my Plus email account set up and working.
By 4 o’clock I had the email saying that the first payment had been taken and that they were now sending the instructions to their network people to do the necessary and that within 7-10 days typically I’d be online. The following morning I came down to a green flashing light on the ADSL indicator on my router. Lo and behold I was fully connected and up and running. Less than 24 hours from sign up to online. Colour me impressed!
Obviously it’s early days but so far I am very happy that I made the choice that I made. My service is unlimited but I think as an indicator of a company that thinks about its customers,the customer account portal has not only an almost real time indicator of bandwidth used,by day,week,month etc,but also a breakdown of the type of traffic that is using the bandwidth. One of the common complaints of people with capped broadband is that they don’t know what they are using so the fact that Plus let all their customers know in this much details suggests a level of thought that is uncommon.
I’m hoping the experience continues along this line,so far I’d say they are recommended.
