Our Network

We manage our network to deliver a sustainable, quality broadband service to all customers, whilst protecting business applications such as VPN and VoIP.

Managing traffic

An unmanaged network lets excessive usage from a small minority impact the experience for everyone. Applications such as Peer-to-Peer (file sharing) and Binary USENET can easily swamp all of an ISP's available capacity. This results in network congestion and slowdowns.

Our advanced technology makes sure that this doesn’t happen, treating interactive traffic in the most efficient way possible.

Plusnet’s network management policies:

  • To make sure that time-critical applications like VoIP are always prioritised.
  • To protect interactive applications like, VoIP, video conferencing and VPN from non time-sensitive download traffic.
  • To flex the network under demand to cope with normal peaks and troughs from day-to-day and month-to-month.
  • To flex the network more gracefully than other ISPs in the event of unusual demands in traffic, or disaster situations such as a network failure.
  • To provide a service relative to the amount each customer pays in terms of usage and experience.
  • Provide a 'quality of service' effect, meaning multiple applications running on the same line interact with each other effectively. Also that the use of high-demand protocols like Peer-to-Peer doesn’t swamp time-sensitive traffic.

Read about our intelligent traffic management systems at Arbor networks

For more detailed information about how we manage our network please read these articles:

Traffic Management and Peak Time Usage Limits

Managing our Network Under Abnormal Load