Minus.net! (PlusNet)

Member Name: Technical Tobes

Product:	PlusNet
Date:	17/02/01 (1244 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Unlimted email addresses / webspace, FrontPage support

Disadvantages: Ridiculous restrictions on use / terms & conditions

Amazingly I was on the verge of writing a an opinion on plus.net, praising their excellent value for money & service… then the Gods intervened and plus.net revealed it’s true colours!!! Prepare for a long (but very informative) review of plus.net…

Ok, as always, let me start with an overview of what you get and for how much (just make sure you read to the bottom though – or you may just make a big mistake & sign up!).

Ok, plus.net, here goes…



/###/ SERVICES OFFERED & PRICES /###/

Plus.net offer the following dialup connection services: Free, Surf+, Offpeak+, 24+7, Biz+ and are planning an ASDL service sometime in the future. Note that the fees are paid on a quarterly basis, i.e. every 3 months, upfront.
Before I go into detail about each service, let me first outline the basic package, which all services include…

- Email addresses: unlimited.
- Web space: unlimited.
- Connection support: Standard, V90, K56flex, 3ComX2, ISDN (64k only).
- Integrated messaging.
- FrontPage extension support.
- 24-hour technical support.
- Dedicated games servers.
- Web based email.
- Uncensored newsgroups (over 70,000).

And now I’ll list each services extra benefits…

/#/ Free /#/
- Cost: Free access, local rate calls.
- Bandwidth allocation: 250MB daily.

/#/ Surf+ /#/
- Cost: £5.99 monthly fee, 1p/min daytime, 0.6p/min off-peak, 0.5p/min weekends.
- Free .co.uk domain name.
- eCommerce facility (Step by step guide to creating an online shop).
- Fax2email facility (Get a dedicated telephone number for faxes – which are then sent to you via email).
- CGI server (Run CGI scripts on your website).
- NetAnnounce business marketing facility (i.e. advanced mailing list).
- MySQL/PHP/Perl programming kit
- Webstats (See how many visits etc your site gets).
- Database Admi
nistration Centre
- Optional static IP address.
- Optional SMTP email rather than POP3.
- Bandwidth allocation: 250MB daily.

/#/ Offpeak+ /#/
- All the benefits of Surf+
- Cost: £5.99 / month for BT surftime + £5.99 / month service charge (total: £11.98) for unmetered off-peak calls (6pm-8am mon-fri, 8am sun – 12pm sat)
- Bandwidth allocation: 250MB daily.
- Contention ratio of 25:1

/#/ 24+7 /#/
- All the benefits of Surf+
- Cost: £19.99 / month for BT surftime + £5.99 / month service charge (total: £25.98) for 24/7 unmetered calls.
- Bandwidth allocation: 250MB daily.
- Contention ratio of 15:1

/#/ Biz+ /#/
- 2 free .co.uk domain names.
- Advanced eCommerce facility.
- Advanced NetAnnounce business marketing facility.
- Dedicated programming team for solutions development
- Bandwidth allocation: 500MB daily.
- Contention ratio of 5:1

A few notes on some of the feature above…
- Bandwidth allocation: This is, put simply, the total amount of data that may pass from plus/net to your modem in any 24-hour period (i.e. uploading & downloading).
- Contention ratio: The maximum number of connections allowed to a single port at your local exchange, thus the more connections allowed, the more users can share bandwidth and thus slow down the network. Hence, the lower the better!
For all other benefits, if you don’t understand them, you certainly won’t need them – particularly things like static IP, SMTP email etc (geared more for network use).

Okay, that sums up the various services offered, of the lot, I have had / still got the following: Free & Off-peak+. Since the off-peak plus account covers the vast majority of services offered, it puts me in a good position to give feedback on what I think are the good & bad points of plus.net…



/###/ GOOD POINTS /###/

-- EMAIL -- Unlimited ema
il addresses --
This can be particularly useful if you have several people sharing your internet connection, although Windows does need to be setup for ‘user profiles’ (i.e. allow each user their own desktop, settings etc) for this to work well. Another good use for this is that you can separate various types of email into different mailboxes (i.e. junk mail, business mail etc).
Another good point, is that you do not actually have to setup more mailboxes to use different email addresses, all main sent to <whatever>@<username>.plus.com will either pop into a mailbox for separate download if you’ve set it up as a mailbox or be popped into your default mailbox to be downloaded with all your other emails.
This is a Godsend for super-organised and high email usage people like me, as apart from anything else, you can keep a track of exactly where junk email derives from by simply substituting the website name as your email address (e.g. I used myoffers@<username>.plus.com to sign up to MyOffers.co.uk and have since traced loads of junk email back to them).
Overall the email facility of plus.net is superb, as well as unlimited mailboxes, you also have the ability to setup redirectors to a different email address and even mailing lists!

-- WEBSPACE -- Unlimited (almost) webspace --
If you have created your own website, you will soon find that you get limited by the poultry 5MB or so most ISP’s offer. With plus.net, you can create as big a site as you like (within reason of course, if you just uploaded tonnes of video, plus.net would not be impressed). Naturally, plus.net do not condone placing illegal material of any form on your site – and will terminate your account if you do.
Another good point is the support for FrontPage extensions – which allows you to use all the features of Microsoft FrontPage, if you’re really into web design, you also have CGI scripts to play with and web stats
which give you information on the number of hits etc your site gets (note: see moans & groans below regarding this!).

-- FAX -- Fax to email --
I really neat feature I found (not free account), is the fax to email service. Plus.net give you a ‘fax number’ to use and any faxes sent to this number will turn up as emails – neat!

This sums up the main good points about plus.net, best of all, all of the above bar the fax to email are available on the standard free account – although bear the following in mind: You can only upload to your website and send emails when dialled in using plus.net, if fails to connect to the web/email server using any other ISP. See below for more detail regarding this.


Now I move onto the bad points! As I hinted at the start of this opinion, initially they where very few bad points, however just over a week ago, plus.net had a big change of business model, practise, service & terms & conditions. No points for guessing that all these were for the worse, but I’ll give a few points for anyone predicting that they are absolutely terrible!!

< hint: now is a good time to go get a cup of coffee! >

Here goes…



/###/ MOANS & GROANS (BAD POINTS) /###/

= User Friendliness =
Now I’m a very technical person (it’s my job!), and even I found it hard to figure out exactly how to use some of the feature of plus.net. The whole site is geared more towards technical people, and explanations of services are often confusing and lacking detail. Often, important information about using the service is hidden away, for example, to download from another mailbox, you need to enter the mail account as <username>+<mailbox> into outlook (or whatever) – this is crucial for it to work, but is hidden away in a massive FAQ sheet.
I never did get my free .co.uk domain name (although not desperately wanted), purely beca
use there were no instructions of how to claim your free one (if indeed you can!!), in fact no mention of it bar the service description page. If you’re thinking ‘call technical support’, keep reading – hint hint!!!)
To be fair to plus.net, a lot of the services are specifically aimed at power users (i.e. eCommerce etc), but making sure the basic aspects are well documented would have made things a lot easier to get going.

= Incompatibility with other ISPs =
Plus.net have, presumably, deliberately made it so that you cannot upload to your website or send email when dialled up with another ISP. This seriously hampers the usefulness of the Free (local call charges) service, which otherwise you could have combined with another ‘free access’ ISP.
Although you can receiver email from plus.net when dialled up with another ISP, replying is then awkward as you have to change the account used to send (options, Send using – in outlook) before it will successfully go.
Again, to be fair, it’s understandable why they would do that and most other ISPs do the same.

= Web stats do not work =
Having web stats is a very useful feature which you can use to gauge, not only how many people visit your site, but also where they are from (i.e. country), what browser they use etc etc. Unfortunately, the stats do not seem to work when using the FrontPage extensions, and thus are useless!

= Technical support =
Plus.net do not seem to like the idea of telephone support, although you can sometimes find the option to speak to ‘someone’, I’ve yet to ever succeed. Instead they, at every opportunity, direct you to using their online support. This is, well crap really, and of course, if your problem is connecting to the net, not much use at all! The first problem I found, when trying to submit 3 different queries (regarding the problems I’ve already covered), is that you
are only allowed one problem at a time – if only life were like that!
Using this system, response was quick, however all ‘emails’ I’ve sent to them have been completely ignored, which I find quite rude.

= Connection & Connecting =
This, originally, was going to end up in the ‘Good points’ section up top, indeed when I first signed up (to the Off-peak+ service), connection was always first time, the line rarely dropped, speed was good and I was happy.
That all ended a couple of weeks ago…
All of a sudden, connecting when from instant to, well, never the first day – I gave up thinking there were problems, called technical support – gave up on that after God knows how long and connected using Virgin.net. The next day was the same, 45 minutes to connect, only for the line to drop 20 minutes later – never to reconnect again that night!
Come the third day in a row like this, I got extremely annoyed and after finally getting in and reading their ‘service status’ page whereupon they blamed BT for reducing the number of ports available for surftime connections, asked for my account to be terminated and me refunded if the problem was not sorted within a week. Incidentally, they could not do this unless I requested it via their sales department, thus I phoned - could not get through, emailed – so far ignored!
Now, them blaming BT is utter bulls**t, LineOne has had no such problems (I have friends using this service), what really is, is that plus.net have reduced the number of ports the pay BT to use – otherwise ALL surftime connections would suffer. Basically, this is what is meant by the contention ratio (explain up top somewhere), which for Off-peak+ is 25:1, or in simple terms, total crap!
A day or two later, they brought out their new terms & conditions & acceptable use policy, which brings me on to the next moan & groan…

= Outrageous &
#8216;acceptable use’ policy & conditions =
Literally a few days ago (today is 16th Feb 2001), plus.net issued their new ‘acceptable use’ policy and new terms & conditions.
The acceptable use policy varies slightly (only in terms of time limits) from one service to another, as I had the Off-peak+ account, this is what I will focus on.
Here is the actual statement of acceptable use ‘guidelines’ as put on their website in regards to time online per day (taken as an average per week)…
Design - 45 minutes
Fair - 1 hour, 20 minutes
Pushing It - 1 hour, 40 minutes
Unfair - 2 hours
*Out of order - 2 hours, 20 minutes
*Taking the Michael - 2 hours, 40 minutes +
*Note: plus.net state they will take action (i.e. terminate accounts) if you use the connection to the extent of these last 2.
Upon seeing this, I couldn’t believe my eyes, I had to re-read it several times to make sure that it really did mean, more than 2 hours per day (14 per week) means your account will be terminated – which, believe me IS true, plus.net do not seem to treat these as mere ‘guidelines’.
Now, I use the internet fairly heavily, as my job revolves around this and the connection is shared with my family. Around 3 or 4 hours a day is quite common during the week, weekends often see this figure go above 10 hours. This would make it around 40 hours a week This is not that unusual, I use MSN Messenger and have many friends that are always online, I know many people who use the internet as much, if not more than me.
Keep in mind that this service is advertised as ‘completely free off-peak internet access’, which is bound to attract user who use the internet a lot. How then, did plus.net come up with those figures, it’s just completely ludicrous! Here’s some interesting facts to prove the point…
- Using the service at Plus.net
’s ‘design’ limit, it would be cheaper to use a non-free access ISP combined with BT’s standard Together plan than it would to use Plus. net’s ‘completely free’ service!!! (About £2 per month cheaper).
- To upload my current website to their ‘unlimited webspace’ would require almost 1 week under their ‘Fair’ use limit.
- eCommerce, fixed IP, SMTP email and online gaming servers are completely useless under even their ‘Unfair’ limit.
As you can see, these restrictions, apart from being complete crap value for money, render most of the benefits of plus.net unusable – how could you possibly have a decent online gaming session with these restrictions?!?
Further more, their terms and conditions have also changed to the effect that if you were to go make a cup of coffee while browsing the web, you’d probably find your account terminated when you got back. Why?? Because leaving the connection inactive for more than 10 minutes is violation of their terms & conditions!!
What I find incredible, is that they reserve the right to change the terms and conditions at any time and without prior or subsequent notification, as indeed they have just done. So, to play by the rules, you really need to read these terms & conditions as soon as you connect to the net – every single time you connect. Now, this in itself is a bit tricky since it takes around 15 to 20 minutes to read them – a violation of the terms & conditions in it’s self, so you’d have to refresh the page half way through reading or something. Now, this has the knock on effect of reducing your actual time online per week from 2 hours per day to around 1 hour, 45 minutes!
Okay, you think I’m being silly, well it’s know more silly than plus. net’s service agreement is it!?!?!
How on earth this is legal I really do not know – maybe it isn’t?
Of c
ourse, as you’ve probably sussed, my account is now due to be terminated, as I did not read these new terms & conditions until the day after they’d been released – by which time I’d already broken them!
In case you’re thinking, well I did ask for them to terminate my account – well , yes I did, but that email has been ignored – the reason they are disconnecting me they state, if for breach of the ‘acceptable use’ policy – a joke! At least that turned out to be an easier way of terminating my account!!


Okay then, that’s the moans & groans out the way, I feel a conclusion coming on…



/###/ CONCLUSION /###/
Plus.net is a case of a brilliant service turned crap! Ridiculous restrictions to the ‘free access(!)’ accounts render them useless – anyone who can actually use the service within these restrictions, does not need ‘free access’!!!

Having said all this, the Free account is still useful – particularly for light internet users. The unlimited emails & webspace & FrontPage extension support make the free account worthwhile in itself and this is the only thing that stopped me rating plus.net as 1 star - in fact, no, I've changed my mind - 1 star it is!!

In my opinion, Plus.net have made some seriously bad business decisions recently, working within the IT industry, I know of several companies that have terminated their business account with plus.net in the last week – God knows how many users have left after the recent service disruption. Plus.net have seriously damaged their reputation, which may well be its downfall.

If you’re not a light user or in need of large webspace / email capacity – STAY AWAY from Plus.net!



Thanks for your time in reading this, please feel free to comment!
TT.

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