I have been more than happy with the FTTC service that I’ve had from Plusnet on trial for the past few months now; even with the 20Mbps download cap that they placed on the service to start with.

During my activation day, Dave (from Plusnet) rang me to check that everything was up and working correctly and informed me that at their network does not see any difference between ADSL2+ and FTTC based customers, Plusnet would need to implement new profiles allow user to take advantage of the additional speed.  In the mean time, FTTC trail customers would get a theoretical cap of around 20Mbps due to being IP profiled at 21000 in their network.

Over the last week, Plusnet have appoved a configuration change that removes this limit.  While it still does not show up correctly in the members web portal (it actually shows a drop in IP connection rate), FTTC users will be able to get their maximum capable speed (up to 40Mbps) and they are already prepared for FTTP customers to come online and get their up to 100Mbps connections.

It will be interesting to see where the actual contention points in the network not lay.  Is it your home, cabinet, exchange, BT backhaul, ISP, Internet or the webserver ???

For now, the new profile lift has as good as doubled my download rate through Plusnet, I’m now seeing the full IP profile speed to BT have shown me at since I took on the trial; 38717 Kbps

This one slipped me by a little but Plusnet completed their backbone network capacity increase in the last week of April 2010 to activate the last two 155Mb network segments of their 622Mb central pipe (aka Plusnet 16).  Primarily with this pipe is for users of their up-to 8Mb ADSL services on the 20CN but Plusnet have allocated 200Mb of additional bandwidth across these 2 circuits for 21CN customers on the up-to 24Mb (ADSL2+) services.

Back when I moved onto the FTTC trial, I was informed that I would be restricted to a max download speed of 20Mb/s until additional bandwidth had been installed.  I am sorry to say that this upgrade does not remove the speed cap.  I posted a comment on the news thread to ask what is going on and for this reply from Bob Pullen:
@goatie999, it’s not a capacity limitation that’s preventing you getting optimal throughput. We need to write some extra code and make some network changes before we can lift the 21000kbps profile (basically we need to create some new profiles that we can then start applying to customers’ acccounts). Unfortunately our developers have had more pressing stuff to work on recently, but I’m hoping it won’t be too long before we get round to it.
Lets hope the developers get some time to complete their work soon.

I received a private message through on the Plusnet Community forum in the wee hours of the morning from a fellow Basingstoke’ite to confirm that his trial FTTC broadband service from Plusnet is now operational.  Apparently, he is approximately FTTC user number 37 for Plusnet, and the 8th on the Basingstoke exchange.

Interestingly, Plusnet have a little way to go before their back-end could support a full rate (40Mbps) FTTC connection but if when my connection goes live, I can also make the jump from an effective 3.5Mbps (on ADSL2+) to 20Mbps, I will be well happy!

Just have to wait the 2 weeks from today for my BT engineer visit