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This page refers to a broadband product that's no longer for sale. If you're a Plusnet Essential customer you can continue to benefit from its features, or upgrade to one of our current products for free.
Please see our Home Phone Product Archive for more information on the changes to the Home Phone part of Essential.
- What is Plusnet Essential?
- How much does Plusnet Essential cost?
- What extra features were included?
- What's the usage allowance?
- What happens if I go over my monthly usage?
- How much does extra usage cost?
- Do I get any included calls with the Plusnet Essential phone plan?
- Do I get a credit limit?
- What are the call tariffs?
- What's the referral value?
- What are the download speeds?
- How is traffic prioritised?
1. What is Plusnet Essential?
Essential offered a 'bundled' broadband (based on Broadband Your Way Option 1) and Home Phone product.
Plusnet Essential was sold between 5th August 2008 and 17th February 2009 and it offers ADSL2+ speeds where available.
[Top]2. How much does Plusnet Essential cost?
Plusnet Essential costs £16.99.
This was reduced to £16.65 between 1st December 2008 - 31st December 2009 in line with the reduction in VAT (15%) during that period. From 1st January 2009 the price returned to £16.99 and has remained there since.
[Top]3. What extra features were included?
- Unlimited Email Addresses
- Broadband Phone PAYG
- 250MB Webspace with CGI and MySQL support
- £1 .co.uk domain available
- Host up to 5 domains for free
4. What's the usage allowance?
Plusnet Essential is a flexible product that allows you to choose your own usage allowance. It comes with 1Gb of usage included as a base. You can either increase this base (at a cost of £1.00 per 1GB per month) or pay for usage as you need it (see question 5 for more on this).
[Top]5. What happens if I go over my monthly usage?
It depends on how you set up your account. Use the Broadband Your Way Control Panel to choose between fixed cost or pay as you go usage.
- If you've chosen to fix your cost: Your broadband speed will be restricted to 256kb/s at all times, until the end of the billing month. Access to binary usenet, peer to peer and external FTP will be blocked. You can increase your fixed cost (adding more usage) to lift these restrictions, or you can wait until the end of your billing month
- If you've chosen to 'Pay as you go': Extra usage will be added to your allowance as and when you need it. You'll be charged for any extra usage and your allowance will reset at the end of your billing month
6. How much does extra usage cost?
Extra usage costs £1.25 per 1GB.
Note: 1GB is equal to 1000MB.
[Top]7. Do I get any included calls with the Plusnet Essential phone plan?
Calls to numbers starting 01, 02 ,03 or 0870 between 18:00 Fri - 08:00 Mon are included.
Calls to 0870 numbers outside these times are charged at the same rate as geographical calls (as of 22nd October 2009).
[Top]8. Do I get a credit limit?
You do. There's a £50 credit limit with Plusnet Essential.
[Top]9. What are the call tariffs?
You can see our rates by reading our Plusnet Essential Tariff Guide.
[Top]10. What's the referral value?
You can see the referral value for these products by looking at our My Referrals Archive page.
[Top]11. What are the download speeds?
These are the speeds we aim for on Plusnet Essential.
- These speeds are not guaranteed, and you may see lower if the network is busy. Similarly if the network is quiet these limits will be relaxed and speeds will be higher
- Before you report a problem, make sure you read our tips on How to get the best broadband speed
| 12am-6pm | 6pm-7pm | 7pm-10pm | 10pm-12am | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Browsing | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed |
| Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed | |
| VoIP | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed |
| Peer to peer/Usenet | Line Speed | 50kb/s | 50kb/s | 100kb/s |
| Plusnet FTP | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed |
| External FTP | Line Speed | 256kb/s | 256kb/s | 256kb/s |
| VPN | 512kb/s | 512kb/s | 512kb/s | 512kb/s |
| Gaming | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed |
| YouTube | Line Speed | Line Speed | 1Mb/s | Line Speed |
| Download sites | Line Speed | 256kb/s | 256kb/s | 256kb/s |
| Download servers | Line Speed | 2Mb/s | 2Mb/s | 2Mb/s |
| Streaming | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed | Line Speed |
| Other | Line Speed | 288kb/s | 288kb/s | Line Speed |
Key
- Browsing - Viewing webpages with a web browser
- Email - Sending and receiving email with an email program such as Outlook or Mac Mail
- VoIP - Making phone calls over your broadband connection
- Peer to peer/Usenet - Downloading with from file sharing applications or binary newsgroups (does not include text only services)
- Plusnet FTP - Using FTP to move files to or from servers operated by us
- External FTP - Using FTP to move files to or from servers not operated by us
- VPN - A secure way to connect to a network at another location, often used by home workers to access work systems. Includes VNC and Windows Remote Desktop. Network protocols such as SSH and Telnet also fall under the VPN category
- Gaming - Online gaming
- YouTube - Online video
- Download sites & servers - Large file transfers to or from the following sites and sources
- Streaming - Playing continuous multimedia TV, movie or music files
- Other - Activities that do not fit into the above categories
- Activities not listed are not restricted but are subject to Traffic Prioritisation
- The speeds shown here don't represent your overall line speed
- Demos, games and system updates from services such as PlayStation Network and Xbox LIVE fall under the Download Servers category rather than Gaming
- Applications not using their standard ports may be classed incorrectly
-
Line Speed depends on the type of broadband you have
- Fixed speed: up to 2Mb/s
- Max DSL/Max Premium: up to 6Mb/s
- ADSL2+: up to 16Mb/s
- Fibre: up to 38Mb/s
Download sites and servers
Connections to the sites and servers listed below may see reduced speeds when our network is busy. The list not exhaustive, and access to other websites that have content hosted by one of the large Content Distribution Networks may also be slowed when the network is busy.
Websites
- Adult bouncer
- Bangbros Online
- Kingdom.com
- Rapidshare
- ImageShack
- Megaupload
- TerraSpace
- badonga.com
- guba.com
- metainterfaces.com
- narrowstep.com
- sendspace.com
- wildrose.net
Servers
- German Mirror site
- Ireland Mirror site
- Kent Mirror site
Content Distribution Networks (CDN)
- Akamai
- Limelight Networks
- Level 3
Many downloads from Apple, Microsoft, PlayStation Network, Xbox LIVE and multimedia content from sites such as the BBC, eBay and Facebook are hosted on one of the above Content Distribution Networks. Depending on your account type, downloads from these sources may be slowed during busy times.
Downloads using download accelerators are also managed.
12. How is traffic prioritised?
| Activity | Traffic Priority |
|---|---|
| Browsing & Email | Gold |
| VoIP | Titanium |
| Gaming | Gold |
| Streaming | Gold |
| VPN | Gold |
| Plusnet FTP | Gold |
| External FTP | Gold plated* |
| Download sites | Gold plated* |
| Download servers | Gold |
| Peer-to-Peer & Binary USENET | Best Effort |
| Other | Silver |
*Gold Plated traffic (and some Gold Traffic) may be rate limited to prevent impact on interactive/Gold traffic at busy times. See Download Sites & servers to find out more about this.
To find out about how and why we manage traffic, see our Traffic Management Guide.
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