Plusnet
Plusnet plc is a British Internet service provider providing broadband and landline services. The company was founded in 1997 in Sheffield, and became a public limited company in July 2004 when it was floated on the Alternative Investment Market. On 30 January 2007, Plusnet was acquired by BT Group, but it continued to operate as a separate business. By December 2013, it had over 750,000 customers across the UK.
In 2018, Plusnet was brought into BT Group's BT Consumer division, the CEO of which is Claire Gillies.
Plusnet Mobile operated as a mobile virtual network operator using the network of EE until it was closed in 2024.
History
Origins
Company names:- FORCE9 INTERNET LIMITED: 15 Nov 1996 - 12 Dec 1997
- PLUSNET TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED: 12 Dec 1997 - 07 Jul 2004
- PLUSNET PLC: 07 Jul 2004 - current
The first Force9 Internet products followed the dial-up internet model popularised by Demon Internet, but offered at a lower cost to subscribers, and including more value-added features. By October 1997, Force9 had achieved the milestone of 5,000 subscribers, assisted by a marketing partnership with Yorkshire Cable, in which Yorkshire Cable customers were offered a reduced subscription on a Force9 account. In addition, software which used Force9 Internet as the default ISP was supplied with every modem ordered through Choice Peripherals.
As the business grew, Force9 was split out as a separate operation from Choice Peripherals, with new premises and an umbrella company under which it would operate. This company, Plusnet Technologies Ltd, opened its doors at Internet House, Victoria Quays, Sheffield, in November 1997.
Although the company was named Plusnet, the brand was first used for products by the business sales team at Force9, for leased line and server colocation services to small and medium enterprises.
In April 1998, Insight Enterprises, an American PC-peripherals company, made a move into the UK market by acquiring Choice Peripherals. However, Insight were principally interested in the online commerce side of the operation, and not in the ISP, Force9. Because of this, Insight largely left the ISP side of the business operating as it had been, with Lee Strafford remaining in charge of the operation.
This coincided with the April 1999 launch of Force9's version of 'unmetered' dial up – which gave 0800 free call rate internet access during weekend hours. The website was re-branded as F9 in order to promote it.
In June 2000, the Force9 brand was changed to Plusnet. This coincided with the introduction of the Surftime dialup internet products, the first real 24/7 unmetered dial-up service in the UK.
Plusnet continued to see month on month growth in the dial-up market, and this growth was further augmented with the launch of a 512 kbit/s ADSL broadband internet service in August 2000. Plusnet launched their first broadband products on the same day that BT first made them available to the UK market.
Plusnet continued to develop their product set over the next few years as new broadband speeds and technologies became available. The initial broadband product performed at a speed of 512 kbit/s, and required a BT Engineer to visit the customer premises to install the service. As time went on, the maximum speeds increased to 1 Mbit/s, 2 Mbit/s and, today, up to 16 Mbit/s. In January 2002, Plusnet launched a 'Self Install' broadband product that the end user was able to set up themselves without the need for a visit to the premises by a BT Engineer.
In January 2004, the Force9 brand was still used by PlusNet Technologies Ltd. Plusnet Technologies Ltd. floated on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange as Plusnet PLC.
In November 2004, Plusnet won best consumer ISP at the Future Publishing internet awards.
In November 2005, Plusnet acquired Parbin Ltd and its consumer ISP MetroNet – which at that time provided a range of 'pay as you go' broadband packages. As part of the Parbin acquisition, Plusnet assumed ownership of several other brands; Pay as You Host, INUK and Port995.
Acquisition by BT
On 16 November 2006, it was announced that BT were making an offer for all shares in Plusnet. The BT deal, worth approximately £67 million, was declared unconditional on 24 January 2007.On 5 March 2007, shortly after the BT acquisition, the Plusnet chief executive, Lee Strafford, and the finance director, Neil Comer, were dismissed by BT. Strafford was replaced as CEO by a former BT employee, Neil Laycock, who had been with Plusnet in various senior roles for the preceding three years.
BT bought the Brightview Group in July 2007, and Brightview's subsidiary Madasafish became a trading name of Plusnet.
In November 2019, it was announced that some 1,600 employees at Sheffield and Leeds would be transferred to BT in February 2020. At the same time, Andy Baker said he would step down as CEO of Plusnet, after six years in the role.
Services
ISP services
Hardware
Plusnet provides asymmetric digital subscriber line broadband and full fibre broadband products to residential and business customers. They are supplied with the Hub Two, a re-branded version of the BT Smart Hub 2 with a modified user interface.Plusnet previously provided two variants of router: the Plusnet Hub Zero router with its ADSL packages, and the Plusnet Hub One with its fibre packages.
Network capacity
Plusnet was one of the first ISPs in the UK to use network quality of service techniques, which it introduced in November 2004, in order to control the finite data bandwidth available to them at peak times. This move was a reaction to the cost of bandwidth, £210 per Mbit/s per month in November 2006 for ISPs using the BT Wholesale network. Critics have suggested that the decision to employ QoS on the network was driven by Plusnet's focus on delivering to tight profit targets dictated by investors during the time when they were a public limited company. Plusnet replaced its QoS technique with a Sustainable Usage Policy in 2005.In 2007, around the time of acquisition by BT, an additional 930 Mbit/s of data bandwidth was made available by adding six BT IPStream segments to the network. This additional capacity has brought the Plusnet total broadband network capacity to 22 155 Mbit/s BT Central segments. This is delivered over five full 622 Mbit/s BT Centrals and two BT Centrals with one segment of 155 Mbit/s active in each. This services a total of just over 200,000 customers at October 2007.
This total data bandwidth figure is only slightly higher than Plusnet's capacity in January 2005, before Plusnet used Network QoS, when they had a total of seventeen segments and 100,000 customers. At that time, there was an imbalance on their network as a result of issues that are caused from using a mixture of pipes. In February 2005, Plusnet reduced to a total of sixteen segments delivered over five 622 Mbit/s pipes.
In August 2005, Plusnet was forced through contractual obligation to upgrade to seventeen segments, and in January 2006, moved to eighteen segments. Plusnet's acquisition of Parbin Ltd in November 2005; with 16,000 customers and three 155 Mbit/s segments gave Plusnet a total of twenty-one segments. However, Plusnet absorbed all of these new customers and decommissioned the three segments, bringing them back to eighteen segments. This was further reduced by two segments, bringing it to sixteen in total – at around the same time as nearly 20,000 customers were moved to the Tiscali local-loop unbundling network in July 2006.
There is controversy that the last two segments should not have been removed. Particularly as at that time, Plusnet increased allowances on all the residential packages. When this contradiction was exposed in December 2006, Plusnet defended their actions, but the explanation given was not positively received by the community at the time.
Plusnet reported that the slowdown in the increase of capacity from January 2005 was due to two major reasons. The introduction of their lower cost, lower capacity allowance, broadband product; which many existing customers moved to, and the introduction of Network QoS and the general network management policy to combat the spiralling usage of a small portion of the customer base. However, it was not fully explained how Plusnet expected to deliver the performance of their broadband packages to 180,000 customers on the same capacity as they had when they only had 100,000 customers.
Usage restrictions
Plusnet has, on a number of occasions, redefined their product usage guidelines in order to reflect changes in overall customer usage or in the costs they incur from their suppliers. This has resulted in customers being asked to restrict their usage, upgrade to a different product, or leave the company entirely. This practice has become common within the ISP market in the UK and is generally accepted, however Plusnet has sometimes made these changes without warning or notice to their customers. Plusnet has argued that the changes made didn't require any notice to be given because they don't consider them to form part of the legal contract with the consumer.Plusnet is one of the few UK ISPs to publish a full breakdown of its wholesale costs, as part of the Plusnet Broadband Blueprint document.