Budget ISP PlusNet has quietly begun swapping from a ‘Shared’ to ‘Dedicated’ Wholesale Broadband Managed Connect (WBMC) platform via BTWholesale, which is a logical choice given their growing customer base and should afford them more direct control over network capacity / infrastructure.
The change, which only came to light after an off-the-cuff remark on PlusNet’s Community Forum (here) and a later follow-up by Kitz (here), means that PlusNet will now effectively be responsible for purchasing (Multi Services Interconnect Links) and managing their own bandwidth / routing.
By comparison the previous / existing ‘Shared’ platform largely left BTWholesale in control of PlusNet’s bandwidth, which was also shared by other ISPs and that can sometimes limit an ISPs flexibility to adapt when congestion surfaces.
A PlusNet Support Agent told one customer:
“We’re very excited to say we’re massively increasing our capacity. We’re deploying an expansion in the current broadband network which will give our customers even more opportunity to make the most of the latest technologies and next generation online services.
We are confident that the new network will deliver a better experience in terms of both reliability and performance thanks to the improved architecture. If you’re on the new network, you may see some difference in the traceroutes.”
Generally speaking any move to a WBMC Dedicated platform is usually one born out of necessity, often after having simply outgrown the WBMC Shared platform. This seems to be the most likely explanation for PlusNet’s change, since they’re quite large now and will want more control over their network.
In theory, assuming everything goes well, then customers are unlikely to notice much of a difference and provided enough investment is made then PlusNet would have more control to improve bandwidth for their customers. This may potentially show via a lessening of peak-time congestion on some lines, but equally they could get it wrong and performance might suffer (usually a short term problem).
Swapping to WBMC Dedicated can be somewhat of a learning experience for any ISP, with PlusNet needing to be cautious in order to ensure that the right amount of bandwidth is available to the right places. This may also explain why we haven’t had an official announcement yet because they probably preferred to wait until it was done.
We have hailed PlusNet for a comment and hope to update again later.
UPDATE 8th Jan 2016
Sadly PlusNet aren’t willing to add anything else to what we’ve written above, which has at least been confirmed. We did query about the time-scale for migrating to the new platform, but they declined to give a clear answer.
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