[Sderby] Talk talk

[Harry Sheppard]

Hello,

I'm a PlusNET "premier option 1" subscriber and I thought it'd be worth
going through my experiences so far, especially as I've finally had a
chat with third-line support at PN...

PN use traffic management solutions from Ellacoya which can classify
traffic into various priorities based on protocol headers and port
number. To date I have found the following:

- Standard traffic (HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, IMAP, IMAPS, POP3, POP3S) can
generally achieve line speed at most times of the day.

- SSH when not destined for port 22 (in or out) is mis-classified as
encrypted peer-to-peer and hence is throttled savagely. If you've
shifted your ssh servers to something other than port 22 to stop the
script kiddies scanning them, be prepared for seconds of latency between
keypresses and responses. I've side-stepped this issue by telling my
servers to listen to an obsucre port generally, and on port 22 for just
my PlusNET static IP. Response times are then excellent.

- Other encrypted traffic is often misclassified. To their credit,
PlusNET have increased the priority of VPN traffic on standard port
numbers and it is better than it was, however they only
priority-classify VPN traffic to business customers and if you are
running VPN services on obscure port numbers, prepare to have your
tunnel religated to "economy class" :-)

- Forget bittorrent for downloading Linux distro DVD ISO images etc. The
fastest I've ever got is around 20k/sec. From my colo bittorrent will
happily max out at the line speed of 12MBit or so.

- You can only download 13GB of data per month between the hours of 4PM
and midnight on the "Premiere option 1" package . You get a warning at
10GB and then if you exceed 12 they throttle ALL services back. If you
exceed 13GB then they throttle to 128Kbit or so. On the upside, off-peak
(midnight to 4PM) is unlimited. This isn't generally a problem, though,
as between "wget" and "at" downloads can be scheduled accordingly.


Overall, I'd have to recommend PlusNET. To date their data-carrier
service has been excellent, although their web and mail platforms have
been somewhat less than reliable in the recent past:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/16/plusnet_deletes_cgi/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/03/plusnet_loses_deleted_emails/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/11/plusnet_email_fiasco/

Would suggest setting up a Linux box on the end of your DSL line or at a
colo - much more reliable!

Just my $0.02 :-)

Cheers,
--Harry