It's not Plusnet's fault that every body is working from home and I'd understand if the service just slowed a little, but I'm starting become extremely frustrated with a shocking Quality of Service.
My dilemma, I just don't want to waste hours and days going through "are you using wireless?", "are all of your filters ok?", "are you in the master socket?". All of the above and more are fine.
When it's working, I'm perfectly happy with our speed, it's nominally 5 mbs over copper and that's fine, latency is on average 40 ms and there are brief periods where it will stretch into a few hundred milliseconds, but that's OK, this is a contended service. The key thing is that for a good part of the last year it's been getting more unreliable, well before the current situation, it's just that lately its turned from bad to very very annoying.
What do I call bad? The router dissonnects for variable periods, a minute, sometimes ten, sometimes a very long time, so total blackout. The Broadband light will either be out or blinking. The latency increases perhaps to 3,000 - 4,000 ms and pings to all the big services, Google, Amazon etc. start to time out with perhaps 100% packet loss, this is whilst the router is still connected.
If using your home as an extended office, the problem really hits when you try to edit documents in cloud services like Google and Microsoft, a lot of that happens locally in the browser but when it finds it can't save the document starts to become emotional and hard to use.
My tech background tells me that I should set-up better monitoring, you only know how good or bad something is and wether it's improved from the numbers and without data your just in the dark. I have Uptime Robot looking back into a webcam but as a free service I think it only checks every 5 mins, so the granularity isn't that good for the smaller problems. Perhaps I should use smokeping for a better idea. But that's my time and money and I shouldn't have to do this for something I pay £250 peer year for. Uptime robot recent logs look like this image link .
I have also considered abandoning ADSL and using 4G, our signal and speed are very good, a monthly unlimited SIM would be a similar price to Plusnet but I'd have to port my house landline number to an IP service to keep hold of it. I could use both ADSL and 4G - double the cost plus about £100 for a failover 4G router so the local LAN behaves like a mobile phone and swaps to whatever is working!
Anybody else gone to these bizarre lengths to get good service.
Should I migrate from copper to fibre to the local green cabinet, to my mind that will just cost more for a similarly poor service, anyone done that and had their internet lives changed?
All the above costs time and money and Ishouldn't have to do any of it - I'd really just like someone at Plusnet to read this and fix my service.
