Thinking of moving from BT to Plusnet - Are they ok?

TanDiy

I have always been with BT but they are increasing the price of our service in a couple of weeks and are not interested in any sort of retention deal. They want £19.20 for ADSL or £23 for 38Mb , £17.99 line rental and £2.23 for evening/weekend calls all on 18 month contract. Plusnet are offering far more competitive prices but I have read that their customer service is rather poor and they do not offer truly unlimited services. I would really appreciate any advice from people using them - is the service good, are the speeds ok. I am also unsure whether there is much difference in the ADSL (I currently get around 19Mb) against 38Mb fibre. Thanks very much indeed.

forgotmyname

Plusnet is BT but with UK call centres.

well 38mb is double your current speed. I went from under 4mb to 73mb with unlimited fibre on PN. To me fibre made sense.

IceColdRum

I have been with Plusnet ever since I switched from Orange Broadband years ago (those were the dark days!) I have found plusnet customer services to be the epitome of helpfulness the majority of the time they are actually owned by BT but from what I can tell they're a bit like the Vatican being in Italy basically autonomous

I've never had any issues with their unlimited broadband not being unlimited when I used to download lots of content I would regularly go over 150gb's a month and not once did I ever receive any kind of communication or incur fees, the only slight negative I have found is that you have to pay mid month as their payment system is antiquated to say the least and you either pay by DD or debit/credit card online or over the phone which they charge you a £2.50 transaction fee for...

flashg67

been with them 3 years and despite some long waits to get through when I've needed them, I've found their customer service knowledgeable and efficient. I currently pay £10 + line rental for 38mb fibre with 80mb available for an extra £5, but 38mb does our family of 4 fine.
Regularly use 200+ gb per month and not had any 'warnings'

The do a referral discount so if anyone you know has Plusnet, get their user name when you sign up and they will get a discount.

brewerdave

I'm been with Plusnet for ~ 8 years,now on unlimited ADSL2+ service. I regularly stream TV/Youtube via the connection -never notice any restrictions and regularly exceed 250GB per month. Only downside is that their Customer Services operation appears to have been swamped for the past 18 months or so, due to them gaining so many new customers -so if you have any problems it MAY take a while to sort !!

DavidP24

When someone says they have been with BT for years I always think they are too busy to be price sensitive, it is not that they do not want to pay less but it seems to take too much time. I used to be that way with Sky and then one day I said ENOUGH is ENOUGH and been saving ever since.

BT have been more popular lately because of bundling Sport but if like me you do not watch it then no point paying more.

If you were to look at the MSE cheap broadband page you would think that there has not been anything new for months with the Sky £216 less £75 cashback (excludes calls) but if you check out the cashback sites and Uswitch there are deals to be had.

Plusnet are not a bad company, they are a bit like the poor relation of BT but being owned by them gives some security. Not sure what will happen when EE is merged, they may shut down EE Broadband or fold it into Plusnet (would be madness to lose Plusnet brand).

Once up and running Plusnet is usually fine, I moved to them years ago when BT did not have support, call centres or support forums, 4 years ago I dumped them for TalkTalk who started off fine but then moved to their "RyanAir" model of charging for every little thing and at double rates too. At the same time they decided not to really compete and the exclusions mean that dealing with them is like walking through a minefield of charges if you make the wrong call or stay on phone for 5 minutes over limit.

TalkTalk also deliberately have their line rental and broadband contracts out of sync so when you cancel you end up paying more than the initial offer for one or the other. I could go on but suffice to say that unless there is a radical change of strategy at TalkTalk it is unlikely I will EVER deal with them again.

We have seen ISP's increasing their Line Rental and Call Charges by around 50% and OFCOM should be doing something about it.

Now the industry is all about these cashback deals for "new" customers, so you are looking at changing every 12m to 18m, I think it is just something we have to get used to.

By staying with Plusnet you are using the same networking infrastructure in the exchange so the move should be quite painless.

One other thing, if you want a deal from BT you have to call them as if you are annoyed with them, call and ask for PAC code for leaving, this is no longer required but it tells them you are serious. Tell BT that you are outraged by the new price increases and that they are offering new customers better prices and have no sense of loyalty to you who have been with them for years. (e.g. £10 for Fibre plus £17,99 line rental before you even add cashback).

if you just want Basic BB and Anytime you can get BB free and calls for £3 with line rental at £17.30 with Fuel Broadband

http://www.fuelbroadband.co.uk/agent/uswitch/unlimited-broadband?source=phg&source=phg

(includes an Amazon Firestick too)

Usually you get a call back with BT rather than put through to retentions straight away as you might with Plusnet and TalkTalk.

Another thing to note is that promotions tend to change every 28 days, so keep checking until the time you plan to switch.

JJ_Egan

When someone uses big big fonts i always disbelieve anything they say .

mac.d

JJ_Egan wrote: »

When someone uses big big fonts i always disbelieve anything they say .

:rotfl:

I stopped reading after the first couple of paragraphs.

Using different fonts, in larger text and posting it all in bold doesn't get your point across better, it just makes it difficult to read!

pollypenny

My line rental and broadband are in sync. Contract ended last May and I renewed at a good price. Any problem I've had with Talktalk has been quickly resolved.

DavidP24

pollypenny wrote: »

My line rental and broadband are in sync. Contract ended last May and I renewed at a good price. Any problem I've had with Talktalk has been quickly resolved.

Good to hear that "someone" has something positive to say about TT!

Their BB contracts often appear as if are12m but are historically 18m their line rental is 12m, the point I was making is that at the 12m mark if you want to take advantage of an online offer from a competitor you have to pay for the 6m of unused BB or you pay for another 12m line rental and then 6m later when your BB expires you face the same problem, you either leave and lose the 6m line rental or stick with them and get none of the discounts that are generally available to the market.

There was a time when TT were interested in competing, so if you saw an offer on Money Saving Expert with Sky or whoever (including topcashback and quidco) they would match or even exceed it. Now they are not interested in matching the prices or even competing, staff are quite rude about it too.

You may be happy and I guess that is because you are happy with what you are paying even if it is a lot more than you could be paying elsewhere.

I also noticed that they are cramming more users on their kit, I saw a 25% drop in speed whilst on their LLU kit, measured by independent 3rd party sites.

To be honest I think there is a bit of a "gentleman's agreement" going on in this market at the moment. Very strange how they all decided unilaterally to ALL remove evening calls, so now you get just weekend calls (or no calls). Then they unilaterally decided to ALL increase the cost of Anytime calls by a whopping 50%. Then they unilaterally decided to ALL increase line rental and not to offer discounts on line rental except for the odd one off special so they can fool OFCOM into thinking it is a competitive market.

TT had a deal advertised in December on Local Radio, it made the point that it was available to existing customers as well as new customers, but new customers online were offered an additional £60, so where is the loyalty? Then you have another mine in the minefield, read the small print and they will only give you the £60 online deal if you are coming from BT not from Sky or Virgin.

Of course TT make things worse my excluding certain types of call from their plan so you end up with a £3 bill for making 1 call to your energy provider or the water company. Sure you can go to http://saynoto0870.com/ and try to find the landline number, but it is the same thing if you go over the hour, the rates they charge for landline calls is on a par with mobile rates.

Then as if allowing your personal data to be hacked was not enough (woman on radio confirmed to have lost £16,000) they give your personal data away without your consent and with no meaningful way to prevent it.

Like most companies, as long as things work they are fine but with TT when they go wrong and you have to call the call centres in India, the Phillipines and South Africa it is a nightmare, the ones in India are pushy and commission chasing, the ones in the Phillipines can say the English words but do not understand the meaning, they also keep you on the line, repeating over and over what they just told you (reading a script) to make the call longer. When you insist on going they call you back over and over saying the same thing, trying to force you to agree. Credit where it is due, the ones in South Aftica are nice to deal with, but they no longer have authority to make a decision or a do a deal, so just a waste of time.

As I said, I am glad they managed to please one customer, I knew there had to be ONE or maybe 1% !!

TanDiy

Thanks for the info - I am a little surprised that, after 28 years as a customer, BT are not interested in offering a better deal - £23 per month for 38Mb fibre on 18 month contract. New customers get £10 per month and 12 month contract. Unless anyone comes back with anything really bad then I think it is time to switch to PlusNet which works out at £9.99 over the 18 months.


PlusNet have told me today that they now supply the BT Home Hub as well.


Thanks again for the info.