35 Facts About Plusnet

Plusnet plc is a British triple play internet service provider ; providing broadband, landline and mobile services.

Plusnet was founded in 1997 in Sheffield, England, and became a public limited company in July 2004 when it was floated on the Alternative Investment Market.

On 30 January 2007, Plusnet was acquired by BT Group, but it continues to operate as a separate business.

Plusnet operates a number of additional businesses: Metronet and John Lewis Broadband in partnership with John Lewis.

In 2018, Plusnet was brought into BT Group's BT Consumer division, the CEO of which is Marc Allera.

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Plusnet's origins go back to 1 February 1997, when Choice Peripherals, a PC computer-peripherals company launched Force9 Internet.

Plusnet launched their first broadband products on the same day that BT first made them available to the UK market.

Plusnet continued to develop their product set over the next few years as new broadband speeds and technologies became available.

In January 2002, Plusnet launched a 'Self Install' broadband product that the end user was able to set up themselves without the need for a visit to the premises by a BT Engineer.

In November 2005, Plusnet acquired Parbin Ltd and its consumer ISP MetroNet – which at that time provided a range of 'pay as you go' broadband packages.

Plusnet currently provides asymmetric digital subscriber line broadband and Fibre broadband internet products to residential and business customers.

In November 2016 Plusnet acquired mobile virtual network operator LIFE Mobile as part of BT's acquisition of EE.

Plusnet was one of the first ISPs in the UK to use network quality of service techniques, which it introduced in November 2004, in order to control the finite data bandwidth available to them at peak times.

Critics have suggested that the decision to employ QoS on the network was driven by Plusnet's focus on delivering to tight profit targets dictated by investors during the time when they were a public limited company .

Plusnet replaced its QoS technique with a Sustainable Usage Policy in 2005.

However, Plusnet absorbed all of these new customers and decommissioned the three segments, bringing them back to eighteen segments.

Particularly as at that time, Plusnet increased allowances on all the residential packages.

When this contradiction was exposed in December 2006, Plusnet defended their actions, but the explanation given was not positively received by the community at the time.

Plusnet reported that the slowdown in the increase of capacity from January 2005 was due to two major reasons.

Plusnet has, on a number of occasions, redefined their product usage guidelines in order to reflect changes in overall customer usage or in the costs they incur from their suppliers.

Plusnet has argued that the changes made didn't require any notice to be given because they don't consider them to form part of the legal contract with the consumer.

Plusnet is one of the few UK ISPs to publish a full breakdown of its wholesale costs, as part of the Plusnet Broadband Blueprint document.

Plusnet used to make heavy use of traffic prioritisation to maintain a stable service.

Plusnet acknowledges on their website how network QoS impacts individual protocols and as a result what experience they expect the end-user to receive.

Plusnet's position is that this prioritisation is in place to ensure time-critical applications like VoIP, gaming, browsing and video streaming are prioritised above applications that would otherwise swamp their available network capacity to the detriment of other customers' broadband experience.

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Plusnet announced that as of 29 July 2017, traffic prioritisation was to be removed from its residential customers.

Plusnet had earlier run a small trial with real end-users for World IPv6 Day in June 2011, with both their website and broadband customers on IPv6 on that day.

YouView TV from Plusnet used the YouView set top box and the Freeview Digital television Free to Air service, but was supplemented by IPTV provision of premium bundles.

Plusnet offered 2 types of YouView boxes, the YouView + box and a standard YouView box.

Plusnet has operated a number of "Virtual ISP" brands, both for its own company and for others.

In October 2010 Plusnet launched an advertising campaign designed to increase brand awareness nationally which emphasised the company's Yorkshire roots, using the strapline "Good Honest Broadband from Yorkshire".

Plusnet are an active player in the UK's web community, playing an active role in web community events around the UK, especially in the north of England.

In June 2005 Plusnet became the official shirt sponsors of Sheffield Wednesday, of the Football League Championship.

Plusnet provided updates on their investigation but did not reveal the size or cause of the problem until 10 July 2006 at 15:39.

Plusnet explained that the engineer responsible had accessed both the live and backup disk packs from a single workstation.