internet voip telephony digital television founded 1997 as plusnet technologies ltd headquarters sheffield south yorkshire england key people andrew baker chief executive products internet services landline telephone services digital television owner bt group website www.plus.net plusnet plc is a british triple play internet service provider isp ; providing broadband landline and digital television services . the company was founded in 1997 in sheffield south yorkshire and became a public limited company plc in july 2004 when it was floated on the alternative investment market . on 30 january 2007 plusnet was acquired by bt group but it continues to operate as a separate business . by december 2013 it had over 750 000 customers across the uk . 1 plusnet also operates a number of additional businesses the metronet plusnet hosting formerly pay as you host just the name and john lewis broadband in partnership with john lewis . contents 1 history 1.1 origins 1.2 acquisition by bt 2 services 3 isp services 3.1 network capacity 3.2 usage restrictions 3.3 deep packet inspection and bandwidth management 3.4 identification of traffic 3.5 ipv6 support 4 plusnet tv 5 virtual isps 5.1 in use 5.2 out of use 6 marketing 7 controversies 8 references 9 external links history edit origins edit this section does not cite any sources . please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources . unsourced material may be challenged and removed . june 2016 learn how and when to remove this template message plusnet s origins go back to 1 february 1997 when choice peripherals a pc computer peripherals company launched force9 internet . heavily involved in early plusnet ; was founder of choice peripherals paul cusack chairman who later went on to create the hardware retailer ebuyer and lee strafford managing director who later went on to lead plusnet through most of its development up to the sale to bt in january 2007 . screenshot of the original force9 webpage from 1998 the first force9 internet products followed the dial up internet model popularised by demon internet monthly subscription plus the cost of local phone calls but offered at a lower cost to subscribers 6 a month vat and including more value added features . examples needed by october 1997 force9 had achieved the milestone of 5 000 subscribers assisted by a marketing partnership with yorkshire cable later to become part of telewest 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 smes . 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 internet service provider 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 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 edit 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 after office of fair trading oft approval was granted . 2 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 . 3 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 . 4 services edit plusnet currently provides asymmetric digital subscriber line adsl broadband and fibre broadband internet products to residential and business customers . it also provides landline telephone products to the same customers . plusnet offers two variants of router it offers the plusnet hub zero sagemcom 2704n router with its adsl packages and the plusnet hub one rebadged bt hub 5 with its fibre packages . since 2015 plusnet has also offered plusnet tv via the youview platform . 5 isp services edit network capacity edit plusnet was one of the first isps in the uk to use network quality of service qos 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 plc . plusnet replaced its qos technique with a sustainable usage policy sup 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 four 155 mbit s in each bt central 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 quality of service when they had a total of seventeen segments ten 155 mbit s centrals and seven segments delivered over two 622 mbit s pipes 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 622s are slightly more efficient than 155 meg segments so this allowed for a similar amount of throughput . 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 llu 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 quality of service and the general network management policy to combat the spiralling usage of a small portion around 1 % 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 edit 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 . citation needed 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 . 6 deep packet inspection and bandwidth management edit this section needs additional citations for verification . please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources . unsourced material may be challenged and removed . june 2008 learn how and when to remove this template message plusnet makes heavy use of traffic prioritisation to maintain a stable service . plusnet acknowledges on their website 7 how network quality of service impacts individual protocols and as a result what experience they expect the end user to receive . this broadband experience is subject to periodic changes without notice in order to preserve the quality of network performance for the protocols that demand extremely low latency . customers are notified of changes by checking plusnet s website freephone telephone number or rss feed . the use of arbor networks e30 ellacoya platform to perform traffic fingerprinting using deep packet inspection and juniper networks erx switches to perform protocol shaping has seen a situation where all protocols including encrypted p2p traffic are identified and managed on their