Plusnet Discussion Thread

inam22 · Wednesday at 18:00

I’ll mainly be using my own Asus router on Plusnet because it gives me better features and performance. However, I still want to have a Plusnet Hub as a backup.

The reason is simple, if I ever have to contact support, they’ll usually ask me to connect their own router before they’ll do any proper troubleshooting. Without it, I’d just end up stuck.

So for me, the Plusnet router isn’t my main choice, but it’s handy to keep around as a backup just in case I need to deal with their support team.

ChrisD. · Wednesday at 18:13

inam22 said:
because it gives me better features and performance.

At the cost of worse security.

inam22 · Wednesday at 18:17

ChrisD. said:
At the cost of worse security.

Does asus routers have worse security compare to plusnet hub?

ChrisD. · Wednesday at 18:20

inam22 said:
Does asus routers have worse security compare to plusnet hub?

I'd argue yes, they've had multiple incidents over the years and shown ignorance in dealing with them. Then there's their utterly horrendous attitude to support and their customers in general.

$anch3z · Wednesday at 18:22

bulldog147 said:
It's very annoying with old fashion PPPoE as I thought u don't need it anymore for Full Fibre as it always ON

The ISP still needs something to authenticate through a radius server and provide an IP address, so PPPoE is essential for residentail broadband. Its only when dealing with leased lines do you get a range of static IP addresses, but then again you will need to configure a firewall/router with policy etc

ChrisD. · Wednesday at 18:24

$anch3z said:
The ISP still needs something to authenticate through a radius server and provide an IP address, so PPPoE is essential for residentail broadband. Its only when dealing with leased lines do you get a range of static IP addresses, but then again you will need to configure a firewall/router with policy etc

It's not essential at all, Sky and TalkTalk manage perfectly fine with DHCP. The others are reluctant to switch over due to the cost and the fact 99% of residential customers wouldn't notice a blind bit of difference.

DIABLO · Wednesday at 19:27

$anch3z said:
The ISP still needs something to authenticate through a radius server and provide an IP address, so PPPoE is essential for residentail broadband. Its only when dealing with leased lines do you get a range of static IP addresses, but then again you will need to configure a firewall/router with policy etc

As ChrisD said, plenty of ISP's don't use PPPoE for residential and just use DHCP. My ISP, Airband is one of them.

Goose · Wednesday at 21:19

ChrisD. said:
It's not essential at all, Sky and TalkTalk manage perfectly fine with DHCP. The others are reluctant to switch over due to the cost and the fact 99% of residential customers wouldn't notice a blind bit of difference.

To be fair though, what difference does it make?

ChrisD. · Wednesday at 21:36

Goose said:
To be fair though, what difference does it make?

PPPoE doesn't work well on some 3rd party routers, being limited to single threads in some *nix OS's etc or poorly implemented (hardware offload as an example). People who want to move away from ISP routers may be limited on choice. Even with UniFi as an example, PPPoE performance has been hit and miss until maybe a year ago when significant improvements were made. It also eats ever so slightly into the available frame size which has some performance impact especially when higher bandwidth is available. DHCP is much more performanct on a wider range of hardware/software implementations.