I have never had ANY problems with Force 9. The customer services are excellent, i am always connected to an adviser in the UK within minutes. Once my broadband was down, and they gave me a dial up number to use free of charge. I think its great, their customer services are so helpful and i really appreciated the dial up whilst they repaired my broadband.

Great provider who i am very happy with and would recommend to anybody.

Like a few other reviewers I was also a Force9 customer for approx 3 years and initially they were very good and had no problems with them. Now wouldn't touch them with a barge pole!!!!! I moved house nearly six months ago and I'm still waiting for my broadband to be connected. I keep getting BT engineers sent round to check the line which is OK but as soon as they try and use my login details for F9 - Nothing. I also signed up for there call package as well and it took nearly three months for them to set it up. They also sent a router to a completely different address. On top of this you can never get to speak to anyone after 5pm or at weekends when people are at home. Overall, I would say Force9 have be one of the worst internet service providers available.

Force9 is a PlusNet company. But for this review I'll call them F9 for ease of typing.

When I first joined F9 a number of years ago they were excellent. Good support, fast reliable connection and some useful features.

However, in the last two years F9 have made a number of mistakes and found myself having to cancel after years of loyal service because I couldn't take it any longer.

Lets have a quick look at the catalog of errors.

• 9th July 2006 - Force9 delete 700GB of emails from their servers by mistake. Despite claims to the contrary on their site, they do NOT in fact backup the servers and all is lost. We loose a tender worth £100k as a result.


• 16th August July 2006 - F9 deleted all CGI date for customers who name starts with A or B - We got nailed again! Again, no backup!


• 17th August 2006 - F9 goes 'Offline' for a day and a half. No refund is given despite it being their problem!


• 30th August 2006 - My partner tries to get our migration number from F9. She is told that they will terminate our account IMMEDIATELY and not allow a migration 'because we are leaving them in the cold". He then says, "Do you want that? Do you?" - Unfortunately for F9 we record all phone conversations and we send it to OfCom who are suitably not impressed.


• 3rd April 2007 - F9's servers die a death due to SPAM.

As most comments about plusnet/force9 go, their service was excellent, however over the last 2 years, their customer support went downhill. Now that is back up and relatively (compared to 2 years ago) OK, their network structure is too small for their customer base. Meaning users are seeing close to dial up speeds.

Had no service for 2 months last summer, now had no service for a fortnight. I've been with F9 for 2.5 years. To start with they were excellent but in the last 12 months the service has been shocking. Very disappointed.

I joined Force 9 two years ago, and initially the service was good.

Within days though, I was unable to connect to the internet. After three phone calls a faulty ADSL filter was diagnosed. A replacement was promised to be sent out as soon as possible. Despite this being an item I had paid for it never arrived, and I eventually gave up calling and bought another form PC World.

Then I started getting disconnected. On phoning customer service, I was given the run around, with Force 9 denying their was a problem. This was a weekly occurrence.

My router would be unable to connect to ADSL for days at a time, and after frustrating phone calls to CS, I'd be none the wiser. Eventually the router would connect. I tried a number of routers and modems, but none of them solved the problem. These faults are on-going, and they are just part of life with Force 9.

The most recent problem, which is one that occurs after 4.00pm every day, as regular as clock work, is that my normal speed of around 950kbs drops to around 80 - 110kbs. I complained about this via the forum, only be told that there's no problem. I was told that I am a victim of contention because I am a broadband plus customer, and priority is given to premier and PAYG customers. So even though I pay for a service that is advertised as up to 8Mb, I'm only ever going to get that during the day when I'm at work and not able to use it. Clever marketing that one.

One of the Force 9 staff replied that he would be happy to change my account to PAYG so that I wouldn't have to suffer the crippling slow speeds at night. That was over a week ago, and I have not heard from him since, despite sending a personal message to him via the forum, that has even been answered.

The final straw for me was this week. Through no fault of my own, my direct debit to Force 9 was cancelled. The first I knew of this was two days after the due date. I logged on to the Force 9 portal to see a message splashed across the screen to say that my service was being cancelled, and the debt had been passed to a collection agency, and the service couldn't be re-connected, and because my home phone is also with Force 9 that was also cut off, leaving me to make expensive mobile calls to Force 9 to try and sort it out. They refuse to be paid by cheque, so I had no alternative but to ask a friend to pay using her card. I REMIND YOU, CUT OFF 48 HOURS AFTER THE BILL WAS DUE, and they are also going to charge me £5.76 next month for the privilege of being cut off.

Connection regularly fails - about once a week.
When I joined the download limit was 20GB. They then moved the goalposts & changed it without warning during the first few months to 4GB, which is causing problems. They make it difficult for you to leave even after the 12 month contract has expired - they charge a cancellation fee even after the 12 month contract under the guise of "you stay we pay", which they didn't tell me about when I joined.

I'm astonished by all the negative reviews I've read on this site! I wonder if I'm living on the same planet. The service status information is always frank and regularly updated. I've never come across everything being 'tickety-boo' when it isn't. I'm now devastated that PlusNet has sold Force9 out to BT. I bought into an independent ISP in the first place, to keep well away from AOL, BT and their like. Like breweries have discovered, independence will last five minutes.

I have been with Force9 for several years (under the brand Freeonline). Having never used another ISP I thought their regular problems were just par for the course but it would appear not. The latest problem resulted in my broadband being down for over two weeks (and still not restored). That came after two weeks of email services being so delayed that emails took over a week to arrive. Of course, if you check their service status it says everything is just tickety boo. The web based mail never worked properly and their excuse was that "it just doesn't for some users - we don't know why" Their tech help is slow, unhelpful and disinterested constantly blaming your hardware or third parties. Totally unacceptable. I'm moving and I advise you don't touch them even with the proverbial bargepole.

Don't use Force9, use someone else!

Force9 have a generally good portal, which is easy to use and maintain.

Unfortunately, over the last 6 months support has gone to pot, as have the reliability of hosted websites and collection of email. The service has gone from being terrific to truly dreadful.

I have been with Force9 for over 9 years, starting with their dial-up service and then moving to ADSL about 18 months ago when my exchange got upgraded. Up to recently I have not had too many problems, but I found their customer services a pain, as it is very difficult to talk to someone. They want you to use a web based message system to report faults, which can be very frustrating to use.
If you do try to talk to someone on the phone, the wait can be easily over an hour, although they do give you an indication of how long you will have to wait.

They have had a lot of problems recently, after trying an upgrade to everyones connection speed, which has gone wrong and caused a lot of complaints and bad feeling, as they have not had the resources to cope with the problems. I believe a lot of customers have left (reading message boards like this one).

I lost my connection 6 days ago, and using their web based fault reporting system I have been informed today that they have logged the fault with their supplier, and it will take a further 5 days before any further update will be given. This is very unsatisfactory, as I need email for my work, and to be without a connection for at least 11 days is not what I would call good service.

My advice - think very carefully before joining Force9 (or Plusnet as they are the same company) until they have resolved their current problems, which, from all indications, is unlikely to be in the near future.

Force9 are ALWAYS down whenever I need important emails from clients. They just have an answer phone message telling you everything is OK, when quite clearly it isn't. I'm off to BT!

Force9 are cowboys who tread very carefully at the edge of the distance selling laws. Whilst the quality of their internet provison is similar to others, their advertising and customer management tread very close to the edge of the law. I would not recommend them to anyone.

I have in the past recommended Force9 to 3 other users.

I now recommend to all those that read this, not to use F9.

I have been with Force 9 for nearly 7 years, and I have no complaints.

Started with the 'free' dial-up account, moved to a 'connect' account, and for the past three years I have had ADSL, all with good service.

Excellent portal and service status information puts them way ahead of the competition.

I can highly recommend Force 9.

Force 9 Internet Service providers, up until recently had been a great ISP. We have been with them for 6 years, and have never really had a big problem.

They have recently put a traffic management program in place so that P2P and FTP traffic suffer greatly. In addition to this, they also penalise you if you top 20GB per month on their premier package. They do this by limiting your speed basically. If we did not rely so much on our email address that we have with them, I would not hesitate to move over to a higher quality ISP that gives you a straight connection to the net, and don't give you one that is handicapped.

If you regularly upload to websites via FTP I would not recommend Force 9.

This is a true story!

Force9 upgraded my line to 2MB without advanced warning by, and although the line to the premises would take it, the noise on the line would not allow the modem/router to sync.

It took a whole month with the outage for the line to be regraded back to a 512KB link, with a could not care less attitude and the usual black hole syndrome when support were called or emailed over the problem.

When the line was finally re-instated Force9 had the gaul to insist that the user upgraded to a business line with a threat of a cut off within a month if this wasn't done.

We've been with Force9 Internet for quite a number of years, and the levels of service have been going down and down.

Our current experience is that we've been without Broadband access for 7 days, and they couldn't care less. When we complained and said we would look elsewhere, they trumped up a £60 charge as a threat. Then they suggested they wouldn't bother finding the fault with their systems if we were thinking of going. I was appalled!!

Where once I would recommend F9 - Plusnet, I have nothing good to say about them. They have turned 'Bulldog!'.

Can I recommend people look at review sites and look elsewhere. Recent news points to Plusnet / F9 taking on even more customers so service can only get worse.

I have nothing but praise for F9 - if they are going to be upgrading bandwidth they always inform you - I have been using them for over a year now and wouldn't even consider changing.