By connection charge, I was referring to the rip off B.T. style connection charge made for each chargeable call made. As for broadband connection charge, I had to pay £30 odd pounds if I remember correctly and provide my own router, along with taking phone services as well to avoid a Plusnet tie-in.
By per-second billing, I mean that a 5 second call with Zen is charged as 5 seconds of 1p per minute. A 5 second chargeable call with Plusnet would be billed at a full minute along with the connection charge. End result � calls around 80% cheaper.
The £3.50 PN anytime calls charge would buy 230 odd daytime and 350 evening & weekend Zen minutes with no connection charge. A no-brainer for those that don't make many calls.
Nearly forgot, PN line rental on Market 1 is £17.99, another big saving here.

Edited by professor973 (Thu 05-Jul-12 13:51:38)

You are entitled to that opinion, but as I will point out again

The technical testing just creates a shortlist, the judging panel decides the winner, and it is equal voting rights amongst the judges http://www.ispa.org.uk/ispa-awards/judges/

So in your opinion who should have won out of the shortlisted five
BE Broadband
KC Home
O2 Home
Plusnet
Virgin Media

In reply to a post by professor973:

Nearly forgot, PN line rental on Market 1 is £17.99, another big saving here.

Market area differentiation only affects Broadband costs, we charge the same (£12.99) for line rental no matter what your market area is.

In reply to a post by orbrey:

In reply to a post by professor973:

Nearly forgot, PN line rental on Market 1 is £17.99, another big saving here.

Market area differentiation only affects Broadband costs, we charge the same (£12.99) for line rental no matter what your market area is.

Sorry, My mistake � Self flagellation underway. Though to be fair, detailing line rental as 'Talk Anytime Charge' with Talk Anytime then labelled as 'Calling Plan' on the PN bill is rather chaotic.

Edited by professor973 (Thu 05-Jul-12 14:44:02)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

You are entitled to that opinion, but as I will point out again

The technical testing just creates a shortlist, the judging panel decides the winner, and it is equal voting rights amongst the judges http://www.ispa.org.uk/ispa-awards/judges/

So in your opinion who should have won out of the shortlisted five
BE Broadband
KC Home
O2 Home
Plusnet
Virgin Media

The best opinion I can come to is probably none of them. I should state I have experience of no more than PN from that selection, but like most, I have read the groans of many that state 'This one is going downhill' or 'That one is not what it was'. So we are treading a minefield really, with all of us at the mercy of B.T in one form or another. Despite all the B.T, knockers, they are falling over themselves to sign up to Infinity of a ridiculous speed that is not needed. Personally, so long as they have a silly 18 month tie-in and call connection charges they can whistle. All that matters in my book is customer service, as even the cheap and cheerful can deliver reasonably reliable Broadband, which brings us full circle to the likes of Zen & Freeola that seem to have many happy customers.

Am I missing something?

The cheapest Freeola broadband seems to be ADSL2+ at £19.99pm for 40GB peak allowance. I've been on Plusnet FTTC 40GB peak allowance for £16.49pm since mid-February. Admittedly with an 18-month minimum term, which (after signing up) Sales told me has a getout at £4 per outstanding month.

The shocking PN CS you describe also includes an unrequested offer of the 80/20 trial at no extra cost, with no extension of my original term, and with the option to revert to my contractual 40/2 service if I don't wish to pay more when 80/20 becomes a standard PN product, if that is at a higher price. I of course accepted.

There was a bit of a mix-up between my original sign-up to 40/2 and going live, to do with engineer visit requirements on an FTTC >> FTTC migration. This was clearly caused by dodgy Openreach systems sending duff messages to PN, which commendably triggered automatic messages to me. This caused me stress at a time I really didn't need it.

My several agitated phone calls to CS were handled faultlessly. After the migration I received a free month as compensation, without asking for that either. The CS on that were and probably still are completely unaware of my involvement here. The 80/20 offer was as a result of this post - note the "tongued" mutter about the 2Mbps upload.

All seems very rosy and hunky-dory to me .

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 05-Jul-12 15:42:04)

In reply to a post by professor973:

All that matters in my book is customer service, as even the cheap and cheerful can deliver reasonably reliable Broadband, which brings us full circle to the likes of Zen & Freeola that seem to have many happy customers.

So by that statement I assume that as this is the Plusnet forum you are inferring that they have many unhappy customers, can you point this out as it appears to conflict with the survey this thread is about.

All ISP's will have the occasional customer that is unhappy for whatever reason with their service even Zen and Freelola but they will have many thousands that support them and are quite happy with the package they supply and with their customer support and service.

You could well be missing the un-metered running from 7.00pm weekdays and covering ALL weekend, along with free hosting amongst many freebies. No need to sit up till midnight download, watch a movie or iPlayer. very user friendly and well worth the money in my book. Of course others may choose by rock bottom price and put up with restrictions, but it is up to them, while we have some choice left in this mad world, best we use it or lose it!

So by that statement I assume that as this is the Plusnet forum you are inferring that they have many unhappy customers, can you point this out as it appears to conflict with the survey this thread is about.

http://www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings_comments.php?isp=1
More bad than good here � Enough to call many.
http://www.broadbandgenie.co.uk/broadband/review/plu...

All ISP's will have the occasional customer that is unhappy for whatever reason with their service even Zen and Freelola but they will have many thousands that support them and are quite happy with the package they supply and with their customer support and service.

I realise all of the above and have stated so many times, but what I find hard to fathom, is the almost fanatical support for Plusnet on TBB compared to other sites. The seem like many, no more than a mediocre setup to me. Cheap, but with some poor customer service. That is as I have stated previously with the notable exception of the few PN staff that drop in here who actually seem up to speed.

Edited by professor973 (Thu 05-Jul-12 16:25:04)

In reply to a post by hypertony:

In reply to a post by lisaj:

I would say well done Plusnet too, we where with AAISP before, we are now paying half as much as we where before, and we are now allowed to use the internet between 9-6.

I for one am glad we made the move

Actually, I think you chose AAISP without reading what they are actually offering, so you can't really blame them! At the end of the day, you read the contract, the small print, etc yourself so you got yourself to blame, really.

I signed up to AAISP, knowing fully what they are offering. I went with them becuse I use the Internet mostly in the evening & weekend and rarely during the daytime (I use around 1GB a month during daytime), so they worked out much cheaper than others. 50GB between 6pm - 12am during the week, 50GB during the weekends and 1TB between 2am - 6am which works out that I have access to 2TB a month. Wonderful!

Ahem, bit of a judgement there! I knew exactly what we where signing up to, it's just that as we worked more and more from home the daytime issue became a problem.

I stayed with them purely because there service was so good, but then they started reducing the unit values, from 100GB offpeak to 50GB offpeak, and I wanted to pay less money per month. I looked for ages at Plusnet before making the move, and eventually did, my monthly bill was halved and I have no worries about working from home now, I could have done with AAISP but my monthly charge would have been horrific.

Just looked at AAISP for old times sake and what I currently have on Plusnet 120GB peak and unlimited off peak £21.49, using 25GB over a month during the day would cost me over £51, and between 12-8am I could download as much as my line could handle.

Never make assumptions about other people.