VAT Increase & Price Changes - January 2011

[#1]

Who got out of the wrong side of bed today? That was totally uncalled for!
He gave you the correct answer and pointed out that it was simple to check it for yourself by looking at the product offerings on the Plusnet home page.

[#2]

Quote from: Fenster

I wasn't talking to you charmless.

Welcome.  I'm Barry, but you may refer to me as "Tactless".
Any more of that waffle and you can rest assured we'll shut the forum down... to you..
Have a GREAT day!
B.

[#3]

Well said Barry.   Jim is one of the most helpful people on the forums.

[#4]

What's wrong with sucking werthers originals? I find them rather nice

[#5]

Quote from: Bob

The average use on Unlimited is 35GB/mnth with 80% using less than 60GB/mnth. Considering those figures, there's a large proportion of customers who stand to save money by moving to Extra.

So Bob if 80% of the customer base on unlimited use less than 60gb and are currently paying you more than what the need to, if they switch to extra package, why do you need to charge on extra £5 a month?
The reason to me is complete greed.
Regards
Mike

[#6]

I suspect that in the 20% there are a significant number who use well over a  hundred GB and that is what costs the money.

[#7]

Hi Jim
But surely when PN was putting the unlimited packages together they would have had an idea of the amount of data used by the typical type of customer (low, medium and high user) then set a price point for the package.
Regards
Mike

[#8]

I will make a supposition/assumption - marketing ignored the advice from the more experienced staff. 
Offering unlimited on a BT line was always commercially dodgy and could only work if the high volume users were downloading on throttled protocols.
Once high definition streaming became more readily available the whole traffic shaping system fell apart.
This gives some background
http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/02/08/iplayer-usage-effect-a-bandwidth-explosion/
This graph is streaming only and is MB per hour per customer
Note that when iPlayer went HD in the middle of last year the bit rate went up to 3.2Mb/s and isn't a throttled protocol on unlimited. This is about 1.5GB per hour
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/04/bbc_iplayer_goes_hd_adds_highe.html

[#9]

Gawd I hope we are not going down the slippery slope of x% of users use all the bandwidth, so we will start banning/throttling those x% then when they leave we will move down to the (x-10)% users. That was one of the things that made me move from plusnet last time about 10 years or so ago. (then Enta tried it and 80% of it users left them  :D)
I am in that top 20% but I pay for unlimited and was told there was no limit to it, I seem to remember a "contest" to see who get 1Tb down in a month (as far as I know it was never won ;)) I accept the severe throttling but now with a 20% increase on it ... I will have to balance electric prices vs pn's increase. (and since I am on a Market 2 exchange I have no option to move to Be erc)

[#10]

If my internet was faster I would be streaming faster.
FTTC is due in a few months...

[#11]

Any chance of some answers to these questions (mainly 1.) from page 6. I'd be interested as I'm in the same situation having just been billed for another month.

Quote from: X

I'm going to change from Unlimited to Extra on cost grounds, but I don't really need Unlimited. A few questions: 1. I was charged £16.34 yesterday for another month's Unlimited. Will I get a partial refund if I switch to Extra immediately? Or can I schedule the switch in the next few days to take effect at the start of next month? (When I switched to Unlimited, I think I had to agree to a 12 month contract, but that period ended two or three months ago.) Possibly OT here, but it's a busy topic so chances of a reply look good,  2. Before I switched to Unlimited, I asked for Reverse DNS lookup to be disabled, which was done. However, I've only just noticed that this is not disabled on my Unlimited account, presumably because of the change in my static IP address. Would I have static IP address with Extra? 3. Is there any way to stop my username appearing in email headers, i.e. change real username to IP address-type name [tt]Received: from username.plus.com ([xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] helo=2)[/tt] to something like [tt]Received: from xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.plus.com ([xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] helo=2)[/tt] Thanks for any replies.

[#12]

1 is easy. All changes happen on billing day so order whenever you are ready and it will happen on your next billing day.

[#13]

This is descending in to farce. For anyone paying by card it appears all they have to do is ring up to get their MAC and the £1.50 charge will be cancelled:

Quote from: thisoldman

Eventually after further 10 minute delays i got though to customer services, where I spoke to a first class courteous and empathic young man, who agreed straight away with me that the proposed 1,50 fee was ridiculous and agrred to suspend/cancel the fee for me.

[#14]

I thought this was an excellent suggestion as to how Plusnet should have approached this:

Quote from: Spider

After much thought I have come to the conclusion that those that pay by card should not pay £1.50 extra, but those paying by DD should pay £1.50 less per month. I accept this is going to eat into Plusnet's profits so would expects to see a £1.50 price rise across the board to compensate. It is only fair that everyone gets charged the same irrespective of what the costs are to Plusnet....

[#15]

An 'apparent' discount to DD payers would possibly have been a better move (as is the case with my energy supplier) but I suspect a similar reaction would have occurred.