220/20 and 330/30 options

[#1]

Thank you all for your comments. It seems this is a point of frustration with the few lucky folks like us who (will) have the FTTP option.
@Adam - as you are offering the FTTP option (trial or otherwise) what is the reason to not offer the full 220/20 and 330/30 speeds? I for one would be happy to pay the extra.

[#2]

The reason Plusnet only offer the speeds they do is that they put people on to the equivalent FTTC account type and charge them that price. Their accounts system does not have the option for charging higher prices for the faster options and to do so would be a considerable amount of development work for very few customers.

[#3]

Just to update everybody here on my research. Only Zen and BT will offer the 220/20 and 330/30 options. At those speeds Zens offering is really only for businesses and includes enhanced care. On the assumption there is no copper line rental, costs are £92.75 + VAT and £112.75 + VAT respectively. Expensive but certainly better supported than BT. Zen do also have a standard 80/20 option at normal FTTC prices.
A&A will only go up to 80/20 (£40 / month) citing network capacity reasons - they think from a commercial perspective its untenable to have a handful of users with the potential to use more than 4 times the bandwidth each of a normal FTTC connection running at full speed. Of course in most cases it would be far more than 4 times. I can see their point.
So for now BT is really the only option if you are budget conscious and like me you want to use the full capacity - if only because you can!

[#4]

@ spoon whittler
I very much doubt there would be a huge amount of development work to add to more products to the mix of their offering. I've been a PlusNet reseller since 1998 (flogging dial-up Free Online in those days) and the product mix has changed 100s of times and continues to do so. My understanding is that provisioning FTTP is essentially the same as FTTC so that's probably not it either.
Its more likely to be a commercial decision similar to A&A - not wanting to give just a few access to massive amounts of bandwidth.
I suspect in time, perhaps with the roll-out of G.Fast, this will change.

[#5]

So why do you think they refuse to offer 40/10 FTTC? It can't be anything to do with the bandwidth as the only option they offer is to go up to the full 80/20. It's because their system can't cope with the extra option.

[#6]

While I'm not going to say it's not a commercial decision (I really don't know on that side of things) it may seem like it would take a huge amount of development time, but it would take time away from other projects that are a higher priority.
Jelv (spoon whittler) is right that our systems don't have the options or dedicated FTTP packages to charge people accordingly. There is also no automation behind placing FTTP orders, so this all needs to be done manually. I agree that the actual manual order placement isn't massively different from placing an FTTC order, but it is different, with a different amount of steps and different pages compared to FTTC. If this was to be built in to an automated provisioning system, that would also add further development time that is currently better spent on higher priority projects.

[#7]

Thanks HarryB
Based on the info I've read about G.Fast it looks very much like the provisioning process for that will be similar to FTTP / FTTC. At the very least the initial top speeds for G.Fast and FTTP are the same - 330Mpbs.
I'm assuming the commercial roll-out of G.Fast planned for 2017 - 2020 will likely provide the extra choice of speeds and include far more ISPs for FTTP as well.
It would certainly make sense to combine them and with a growing choice of super fast products and speeds one would also assume that Openreach will simplify the provisioning process at some point.
I guess I will just have to wait and see!