Installation - took less than an hour with a very pleasant OpenReach engineer (I guess all those grumpy GPO ones have long since retired). Having just moved into our house and inherited a spaghetti of telephone wires I was delighted when he readily agreed to install a new master socket a few feet from the entry point to the house. It was his first experience of a non-HomeHub installation and was keen to see how things worked with the Plusnet supplied router (a Netgear WNR1000). We tried the trick of connecting everything up and hoping for a connection – but soon reverted to reading the helpful, simple instructions supplied by Plusnet. Two minutes later we were recording our first speed test - 36Mbps download/8Mbps upload.
Wired Performance – very variable for a few days – after the first day high it dwindled back to 4/6, had a few disconnects and some frustrating snail like sessions. Since this teething phase it’s been fairly consistent at about 38/8.
Wireless Performance – this took longer to settle down and the connection of a plethora of devices – some n, some g seems to affect performance – sometimes it slows back to 5/5 for no apparent reason – majority of the time it runs at about 22/8.
Summary:
• an excellent step up the speed ladder
• downloading large files is a joy
• an hour of tv on iplayer takes only a few minutes
• patience is a virtue over the early weeks
• worth remembering it a trial
• it seems to me that broadband (particularly wireless) is still not a totally dependable experience day in/day out
• at these speeds even the bad days (5Mbps download) let you happily email/surf the web.
Thanks to Dave T and all others involved at Plusnet
