Hi guys...

Like many my age (grey and old) I suppose I tend to choose a suppier, be it for power, telephone, internet or whatever and tend to stick with them. I guess that's short sighted but as you get older you tend to get complacent.

Anyway........... I am with Plusnet for my internet and have been with them for years; maybe 7 or 8. I have only once contacted them when I saw that what I was paying for at £25.99 was then available for £21.99 and was promptly switched. I'm sure I wouldn't have been had I not contacted them. So that brings me to where I am now !

I haven't ever been unhappy with the service I get from Plusnet but, when my youngest is home from uni (permanently now) usage has tended to rise and today I got an advisory email from Plusnet telling me that we were approaching our 'limit' of 13 Gb peak usage for the month and could face 'slight restrictions' if we exceed this limit. I think total usage including non peak usage is something like 40 Gb and we have 4 computers in the house.

My question is have I been lax with Plusnet in simply paying the monthly fee and should I have been pressing them for a cheaper and better deal before now ? I'd be very grateful for any comments or advice regarding what I should expect for this monthly fee as I'm beginning to wonder whether I could be getting as good a deal if not better with another providor for the same or less money. I firmly bellieve in the concept of loyalty to a supplier but I also believe that's a 2 way relationship... something that certainly doesn't seem to happen in many industries these days and certainly not the insurance industry !

Anyway.... feel free to offer any help that I may use if/when I call Plusnet to suggest a new deal.

Just to add... I'm on an "up to 8mb" connection usually connecting around 4-5 mb.

Regards Paul

£21.99 for 1 month with 40Gb useage sounds cheap - especially if you are happy with them.

Zen, for example, would allow you 50Gb useage per month for £21.27 and they are about to start a fibre rollout (if your BT exchange has been made FTC) and are then talking about useage limits up to 1Tb per month.

With internet I always feel you get what you pay for.

Just be careful with PlusNet, their new products look dirt cheap on paper but are more "speed managed" (i.e. throttled) than their older legacy products. For that reason, I stuck on one of their older products, "Broadband Plus (Up to 8Mb)" because I didn't want to be throttled in peak hours - well, all products are throttled to a certain degree, but the older ones aren't as much.

Plus, if they upgrade you to their latest products, check the small print as when they brought them out earlier this year they were a bit naughty when existing customers (on a month-by-month contract) upgraded, they didn't realise they were signing up to an 18-month contract. And if you then wanted out, they'd charge you the remainder of the contract (sometimes over £100). Not good, especially as they weren't upfront about it. There were lots of complaints on their forums for a while afterwards, and I believe they made some changes to their terms and conditions to make it more obvious to existing customers that it effectively starts a new contract when you upgrade to a new product.

PlusNet only started these underhand tactics since BT bought them out a couple of years ago. It's been downhill ever since. I used to recommend them to friends and family, but not any more. I would probably switch, but I have a domain hosted with them and it's nice and convenient to continue as I am for now. If I switched, I'd have to sort out additional hosting and renewal charges - with PlusNet, hosting and automatic renewal is all handled as part of my monthly fee (£15.99) - that's about the only good thing about PlusNet for me. The new products don't offer web hosting at all, it was scrapped when they refreshed the products (another reason I didn't "upgrade"), plus other good stuff like static IP addresses were shelved too. The new products are just a basic internet connection really.

If I were you, I'd look at other ISP's products before signing up with PlusNet again.

The trouble with Plusnet is that they don't move you to (or let you know about) cheaper/better price plans when your minimum contract has run out. I spent ages on an old price plan until I spotted a cheaper one on their website. It offered a higher download limit for less cash. I went from 2Gb for about £10 to 10Gb for about £6. I had to ask to get it though.

They currently offer 60GB usage for £11.49 a month (with asterisks of course , ie it's closer to £18 if you live in the wrong area.)
CLICKY
Give them a ring and tell them you want to me moved onto this price plan.

As far as service goes, I generally found them to be good. I know thay can throttle torrents, but as I don't use torrents, I couldn't care less.

I moved from PlusNet to O2 which is less than half the price as I am an O2 customer. To be fair, it was done for cost reasons, I never had a problem with PlusNet.

I am now on an unlimited connection getting 16Mbps.

I'm amazed nobody has mentioned the apostrophe yet, but I'm certainly not going to

I've been with PlusNet since 1997 when they were Force9. I've consequently got one of the legacy products with less of a cap. I also get £2 worth of loyalty discount for the other people I signed up with them over the past 10yrs. So I'm paying £21 for 20gig but unlimited between midnight and 4pm.

However, my parents still use that connection and meanwhile I've moved to the flat at work. Here I've put the business with Zen and I also use that. Their tech support is 100%, the speeds are great (for the middle of nowhere in Cornwall) their cap is generous (200Gig) and no shaping. Also, as it's business, I get 20:1 contention not 50:1. All for £45.

Been very, very happy with them and would recommend them to anyone. JohnSheridan's right - you get what you pay for. I'm a "power user". If you're not, go for one of their cheaper packages, but either way Zen are great.

Had I posted in this thread it would have been the first part of my post

ISWYDT

I'm with Zen as well and would thoroughly recommend them. Price JohnSheridan quotes is the ex VAT price (it's £24.99 with VAT).
All Zens products have a 1 month minimum contract so if you don't like them for whatever reason you can leave in fairly short order so I guess that gives them some incentive to delight their customers.

I've also considered Andrews & Arnold as they also do short contracts and are somewhat cheaper than Zen but get similar customer satisfaction, speed and reliability stats on Thinkbroadband (Zen & A&A also appear to kick PlusNets backside in all three scores by the way). A&A also seem to offer a lot more in terms of technical knowledge and support if you want to go nuts and get into the guts of your broadband (you can also get BE based backhall through A&A so you can avoid BT but you pay quite a lot to do so). Check out the A&A website and see how much it would cost as their tariffs are based on peak (9am - 6pm weekdays) and off peak (all other times) units so if you use a lot during the day it'll probably work out more expensive than Zen.

I'm glad someone appreciated that

I was on a similar package until about a year ago - one of the old premier/gold accounts.

I switched to a £19.99 pm account with an 80gig cap - still unlimited after midnight, but only until 8am.

There is a little bit of additional traffic shaping at peak times but, all in all, it suits us much better.