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.

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.

This coincided with the introduction of the Surftime dialup internet products, the first real 24/7 unmetered dial-up service in the UK.

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.

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.

[8] 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.

The BT deal, worth approximately £67 million, was declared unconditional on 24 January 2007 (after Office of Fair Trading (OFT) approval was granted).

[10] 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.

This router is a significant markup from the Hub One, due to the aerial improvements and internal filters which help block interference.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The introduction of their lower cost, lower capacity allowance, broadband product; which many existing customers moved to, and the introduction of Network QoS and the general network management policy to combat the spiralling usage of a small portion (around 1%) of the customer base.

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.

Plusnet acknowledges on their website[13] how network QoS 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.

File sharing applications and binary Usenet are the most heavily managed protocols on Plusnet's network, and are collectively treated as low priority on most of their consumer products.

Mistakes when this system was first implemented resulted in misclassification of some protocols, which made certain applications unusable at peak times.

Non-standard applications still remain susceptible to misclassification (e.g. running SSH on a non standard port other than 4500 or 10000 which are set aside by Plusnet for this purpose).

Continual improvements in protocol identification along with a significant increase in available bandwidth mean that the implementation is generally considered to be working successfully.

The network was closed to new customers in March 2023,[24] with the firm offering exclusive discounts to encourage people to move over to EE.

Plusnet explained that the engineer responsible had accessed both the live and backup disk packs from a single workstation.