Utility Warehouse (Telecom Plus) Discussion

Hopefully I can get the answer here as when I Google it, I cannot get near an answer. Forgive me, I have also posted the same question on the CAG as we are so fed up with what we feel is a very poor situation.

A few years ago we had all our services with different providers. Our gas and electric with Scottish power, Telephone with BT and broadband with Orange. All were paid at differing times and we found that as all the people in our house have mobiles, we never really used the home phone.

We were given a demonstration by a friend about the wonders of Utilities Warehouse. On the face of it we could save some money by combining all our services and going on their gold membership.

Our first problem came from the broadband, with Orange we paid £5.99 a month and never had a problem, connection was around 2meg and never dropped. We never had fast speeds advertised by everyone as we are so far from the exchange. But once we had UTW this dropped from 2meg to our current 100K. Basis services that the kids used such as BBC Iplayer became impossible.

We never used the landline either so there was no change, where their combined phone and broadband package saved money, the cost of what little calls compared to BT’s meant the bill went up and not down. When we questioned our friend we were told that this was so we got their monthly “free” membership and Card. We never used the pre-paid debit card as it is very inconvenient to use, putting money on it from our bank account, then a few days later it appears. We don’t live in a town with a Sainsbury’s petrol station, one of the big selling points (spend over £50 there, then fill up, get 5p off a litre, plus 5% cash back). So that is no use to us.

Our gas and electric no different apart from having to ring in the readings every month compared to the quarterly bills.

We received over a couple of week silent phone calls and asked UTW to change our number that we took from BT. They did this but even changed the area code from 02476 to 02477, which caused no end of confusion as people thought we were giving out the wrong number to them. They did not tell us that we would also lose the ability to change phone supplier again.

Anyway, as the broadband was so poor (just speed checked and was getting 125kps up and 50kps down) we thought £25 per month was not worth it. Orange have offered us a deal because all our mobiles are with them of home phone and internet for £7.99 a month, so it made sense to change over. We contacted Orange to take up their offer only to be told that UTW had untagged our phone number which stopped other companies from transferring it. Orange said the only way we can could get around it was to cancel with UTW, get a BT line installed (remember we were with BT before we changed over to UTW), wait for the contract period to expire and then move over to them. All in, a process that could take over a year and cost a fortune. UTW said that they do not have to allow our transfer out to another service provider as they own the line. This is something I cannot understand at all. We were with BT to start with, when we moved to UTW our number stayed the same. UTW have also said that our broadband would be cancelled too.

Does anyone know enough to help out? What can I do without having to have BT install a new line (technically flipping a switch). How can Utilities Warehouse do this to customers? It have got our backs up so much we want to move all our services away from them. We owe them no money so there is no debt issue to deal with.

Any help or advice given would be appreciated.

Thanks

Jon