Cease charge of £31 for standard BT Broadband

pac303

My BT Broadband & Line rental ends in Feb. Have been told by BT cancellation team if I cancel before or after the end date I will still be charged £31 to cease broadband.
They said this is standard with all suppliers but I've moved at least 3 times before and never seen this charge.
Another similar thread on here said this may only be if you cancel and don't move to another supplier?
Anyone know the true position?
I am planning to wait until only a few days left then start switch to Plusnet.
Total pain - if they all stopped ridiculous introductory offers and just charged a fair ongoing price we wouldn't have to bother with this every 12 months.
Thanks in advance, Paul.

Browntoa

If you switch it's free , if you cease first it's £31 for BTs time to do the work

pac303

Thanks, I thought it might have been willful leaving out / missleading information after she failed to sell me discounted fibre. I remember why I left BT before, same old same old.

Sterlingtimes

pac303 wrote: »

Total pain - if they all stopped ridiculous introductory offers and just charged a fair ongoing price we wouldn't have to bother with this every 12 months.
Thanks in advance, Paul.

I'm in the same boat. I would like to continue with BT but a saving of over £10 a month in moving to Plusnet and considerable upfront saving makes a shift a no brainer. It is a crazy business model that a company disincentives loyalty. I would have settled for a small price difference to avoid all of the inconvenience.

PS: This was my incentive to stay with BT: "At the moment, you've got BT Privacy with Caller Display on a free offer for 12 months*. This offer ends on 11/02/2016.Then you'll start paying the usual £1.75 a month to keep the service.
But don't worry, you can easily renew your offer for another 12 months"

macman

It's not a BTR charge, it's an OR charge and has been in place for at least 5 years now, regardless of provider. It's not a crazy business model to clobber 'loyalty', it make perfect sense, and enables the rest of us to enjoy the discounts. Why discount prices to people who are not going to leave anyway?
And what inconvenience? BT to Plusnet is efectively just a billing change-same hardware, same network. At worst you might have 30 mins downtime.