Plusnet review: the no-frills option

Most budget brands work the same way. Take the parent company's product. Strip out the expensive bits. Then quietly strip out the customer service too. Plusnet has done the first two and skipped the third, which is rare enough to be the whole story of this review.

So here is the trade. You get BT's network, a Sheffield call centre and the joint-best complaints record Ofcom published in May 2026. You give up TV, mobile, mesh wifi guarantees and anything faster than 900Mbps. Whether that works for you depends entirely on how many of those frills you were actually going to use, which for most households is roughly none of them.

Plusnet sells full fibre at average download speeds of 74, 145, 300, 500 and 900Mbps over the Openreach network, with the top tier uploading at around 110Mbps. If full fibre has not reached your street yet, the older copper-based plans at around 36Mbps and 66Mbps are still there as a fallback. If those labels mean nothing to you, FTTP, FTTC, cable and 5G: broadband types explained is the five-minute fix.

The thing to understand is that the line is identical to BT's. Same fibre, same cabinet, same Openreach engineer at the door on install day. When Plusnet undercuts BT on the same speed, you are not buying a worse connection. You are buying the same connection from the same group with a plainer logo on the router.

What you cannot buy is anything quicker. Plusnet tops out at 900Mbps while sister brand EE sells faster Openreach tiers and Virgin Media goes further still in its areas. For most households 900Mbps is comfortably more than enough, but if you came here chasing multi-gigabit speeds you are in the wrong shop.

Plusnet's pitch is value, so its plans tend to sit near the cheap end of the big-brand market. The live prices move too often to print here, so the current Cheap Broadband Deals and Broadband Only Deals are where to check exactly where it lands this month.

The annual rise follows the BT Group pattern. A fixed pounds-and-pence increase every 31 March: £3 a month on contracts taken from 11 July 2024 or £4 a month on contracts from 5 August 2025, both set out at sign-up. That fits Ofcom's rule banning inflation-linked rises on contracts signed from 17 January 2025, so the figure is printed in the contract rather than left to next year's inflation announcement.

Here is the honest catch. It is the same £3 or £4 BT charges, applied to a cheaper starting price, so proportionally it stings more. Factor it into the full-contract cost before you sign rather than discovering it on the kitchen counter next April.

This is where Plusnet earns the review. In Ofcom's complaints figures for Q4 2025, published in May 2026, Plusnet drew the joint-fewest broadband complaints of any major provider, around 5 per 100,000 customers alongside Virgin Media against an industry average of 7. In Q3 2025 it had the fewest outright. For a brand whose entire job is being the cheap one, that is a remarkable record.

Mind you, its Trustpilot score is middling, hovering around the high ones and low twos. The gap makes sense. Ofcom counts complaints serious enough to escalate; Trustpilot collects whoever was cross enough to type. The Ofcom measure is the better-controlled one and Plusnet has sat at or near the top of it for several quarters running, as of June 2026.

The Hub Two is a rebranded BT Smart Hub 2, which means wifi 5 rather than the newer wifi 6 standard, no mesh add-on and no whole-home coverage guarantee. In a small or medium home it is perfectly fine. In a large house with thick walls, the back bedrooms will feel the difference, because BT sells Complete Wi-Fi discs for exactly that problem and Plusnet sells nothing of the sort.

The list of things Plusnet does not do is genuinely long. No TV bundles. No new landline products. No mobile bundles. No social tariff of its own either; eligible low-income households are pointed to parent BT's Home Essentials instead, which is worth comparing directly before you sign anything. The brand has decided to do one thing and the honesty of that is half its appeal.

Plusnet suits the household that wants broadband to be a utility: a fair price, a connection that works and a complaints record suggesting you will rarely need to call anyone. If that is you, start with the question What broadband speed do I actually need? answers (most households land lower than they expect), then compare the Full Fibre Broadband Deals options at your postcode. (How we rank deals and where our data comes from is on the record, if you want to check the ordering.)

Look elsewhere if you want a bundle, multi-gigabit speeds or guaranteed wifi in every room. Sky and Virgin Media own the TV-and-broadband market, EE carries the faster Openreach tiers and BT will promise wifi in every corner of the house. All cost more. That is the trade in one sentence.