Existing Customers of Plusnet to get Free Speed Boost

It has been announced by Plusnet UK, one of the popular internet service providers operating in the United Kingdom that it would be giving its existing customers a speed upgrade for free to its up to 20Mbps 21st Century Network.

It is worth mentoning here that the new 21st Century Network based on the 21CN of BT offers considerably lower latency compared to their existing up to 8Mbps 20CN services. Low latency is beneficial for services such as VPN (Virtual Private Network), multiplayer gaming and voice over internet protocol (VoIP).

Incidentally, the average latency for the traffic of Titanium and Gold packages of Plusnet across the 20CN network over the past six months have been 1.20 ms and 1.91 ms respectively. On the other hand, the average latency for Titanium and Gold traffic over the 21CN network are 0.17 ms and 0.96 ms respectively.

Unfortunately, the 21st Century Network platform hardly covers all. As a matter of fact, the 21CN platform is still effectively very much in the rollout process. As a result, a few customers, usually regardless of the ISP chosen, might be left in a disadvantageous position until the task is taken up by BT.

Plusnet UK stated that they were starting with more or less 12,000 customers in March and carryin on with another 8000 customers a month. Their aim is to have more than 60 per cent of their customers connected by the end of 2011, on up to 20Mbps speeds, against the 15 per cent already enjoying those speeds.