I'm not too closely involved with the conversations between BT and our management team TBH, but I'm fairly sure they're aware of our forecasting model.

Yes sir.

There's a rather nice bottle of white glinting at me, so I shall bid you farewell 'til the morn.

Glad I didn't need to borrow your persuader
...and it's a pity I wasn't quick enough to take a pic of you with it last year

Hi Mand, As Strat said, you really ought to get some "me" time.

On BBYW, the customer had the choice of living with 128Kbps speed 'til the end of the fiscal month .... or paying for an extra GB. Now, the only option is to pay for 2GB ..... or have tor connection suspended.

Not the PlusNet we knew and ....

I am still amazed at what has happened and thought the BBYW refresh was a big change but the new products are throttled to death. Where is line speed downloading done and the value added extras too?

Forgive me if it has been said already, but is the definitive Product Refresh or is the jury still out for it?

As it stands I am not comfortable in recommending Plusnet. The customer care is second to none but the products on offer are a non-starter. 2Mbps dl speed - what is that about and only costs £19.99 for someone like me 

Can I recommend that all those sucked into the "unlimited" product consider running an anonymiser http://www.torproject.org/

Since this is web traffic, it shouldn't hurt your slow connection.
Why not relay a few GBytes each day - it won't cost you a bean!

Plusnet will buy unlimited hardware to support you

As has been said many times this thread is being digested, summarised and passed to 'higher levels' also this is the first phase.

I think you're perhaps being a tad disingenuous when you say the new products are 'throttled to death'. We've made clear what maximum data transfer speeds you should expect in our FAQ here: http://www.plus.net/suppo...ity_broadband/speed.shtml  Line speed is available overnight for many of the traffic-managed 'download' protocols - this doesn't differ too much in this regard from BBYW. For most, the experience for average use should be great.  If it weren't then we'd expect to hear about it first here in the forums.  If traffic management isn't for you then of course there's the Pro product that has up to line speed across all protocols at all hours.  Value add? Email, webmail, the MyAccount / VMBU are all there.  Do you have any referrals who are looking for webspace/domain hosting?  We find it's mainly businesses these days looking for those options on new accounts.  As we've said previously, existing customers can continue to use these services, even if moving to the new value/unlimited products.

Peter, With the greatest respect, you need to wake up and smell the coffee!

Calling the new products  'throttled to death' is no more of an exaggeration than PlusNet's use of the term "Unlimited".

 

Do you know the greatest irony here?  I suspect most of the people posting, including me, have been with PN (or one of its children) for way more than 18 months. I just checked and the payment for my line activation was over 6 years ago.  I've already agreed to stay for another 12 months (for the cost of a new router) and don't envisage leaving after that (barring serious unhappiness, and a drop in customer standards).  Most of us have stuck with PN through the SPAM days, and really bad connections, and drops in service, and we're still here, because we like the experience, and the daft threads, and the useful support from fellow customers as well as the great PN staff.

I think everyone is right to raise the issues that have been raised, and to remind "the suits" that they can't take a loyal customer base for granted.  I'm sure that in time they'll see sense.  In the meantime I, like others, won't feel able to recommend friends and family to commit themselves to a relatively long term contract (even though we're pretty sure that they'd be staying for at least that long)

Well done to the PN staff (especially Mand) who have taken the brickbats.  Maybe they should ask the guys at the top to take a spell on the boards and answer a few questions.  Suggest that they walk a mile in your shoes, before they make sweeping changes such as these.

John

Hear Hear, well said

John,
An extremely good message, thank you.  Let's hope we get PN to see some sense

Ive been with plusnet since May 2004, one of the key reasons i joined was the 1 month contract.
Ive recently ( wityin the last two weeks) recomended plusnet to someone on the basis of a one month contract, and the ability to change their product ( broadband your way) if they needed more download capacity.

An 18 month contract is a huge amount of time to be tied down, would someone who is migrating into plusnet  via the mac code method be tied to a long contract or would they be on a rolling 1 month contract?

@pint
 
They will be tied to an 18 month contract. 
They will not be able to sign up for BBYW now. 
Their only options now are Value, Unlimited or Pro.

@pint
If they signed up before the new packages were announced they'll be on the BBYW 1 month contract, if not it will be as pd says.

I suggest you are being somewhat disingenuous by calling the product Unlimited. In case you haven't seen what I said earlier in this topic I'll repeat my comments here (there was no comment from Plusnet on the suggestion I made).

The unlimited product it isn't unlimited. For downloading files a simple formula applies: hours x rate limit for the protocol = the maximum amount you can download. To me there is a very simple test: Is the amount that can be downloaded on the account less than that which could be downloaded if there were not any restrictions on protocols? If so it is not unlimited. Plusnet "Unlimited" fails this test.

Now if you had called it Plusnet Unmetered - i.e. we don't care how much you download and there is no FUP (visible or hidden) - it would be a totally accurate description of the product.

Let me make one thing very clear at this point. I am not criticising the product, I think it is a very good product and an excellent move by Plusnet providing people buying it understand correctly what they are buying. What absolutely sucks is the name and the way it is being marketed.

The product you have launched is unlike any offering I've seen from any other ISP. The limit on it's usage is similar to contention (however on your network scale rather than just being contended per exchange), but far more intelligent. You have long experience of tuning the network to give priority to the protocols that matter when someone is sat at the keyboard. Plusnet bragged about leading the field on traffic management and the specification of this product means it should be a market leader. However instead of leading the market again by giving the product a correct name you pull a dumb stunt and go back on everything you has said over the years by copying the totally misleading naming of the all the other ISPs.

Do you not realise that you have missed a golden opportunity? People who don't know Plusnet may know that Unlimited means far from that with other ISPs, they'll see Plusnet Unlimited and won't look at the details. It may be that they know Plusnet and if so they may well remember that you said that there could be no such thing as unlimited and dismiss the product without reading the details. However if they saw Plusnet Unmetered it would be different, they'd stop and look to see what it was about, why it was different to that offered by other ISPs. You could make it crystal clear that Unmetered meant no FUP. You could complain to the ASA if other ISP's tried to copy you (as they would) with products called Unmetered but with a FUP. You could have been the leader by being what you used to be - honest.

When you said there could never be an Unlimited product at an affordable price you were right. You should be stressing that Unlimited means hidden caps, FUPs, general slowdowns across all protocols and stressing that Plusnet Unmetered is different, far more intelligent with full speed browsing and gaming.

Be different, be honest, be better!