Plusnet PAYG upgrades

I suppose after many months where FUP's, SUP's changed allowances etc
upsetting Premier and BB+ users the time would come when they would
decide it was time to upset the PAYG users - well that time has arrived!

Firstly we have the fiasco over the free overnight usage. A newsletter
was sent to all users saying that from the first billing date after 30th
March midnight to 8am would be free. NOT TRUE - at least for some users.

PAYG users billed 31st March, 1st & 2nd April will not get free
overnight until their next billing date (beginning of May).

PAYG users billed 3rd April have been told they are OK (although figures
in VMBU still include overnight).

PAYG users billed 4th, 5th & 6th are being switched on the 7th - we
don't know if they will get free overnight between billing date and 7th.

PAYG users billed 7th onwards should be OK.

I image that anyone who has been doing extra downloading overnight in
the belief it was free and finds they are then charged extra will be a
little upset!

Secondly, Plusnet have backed out of a commitment given some time ago
regarding upgrades to MaxDSL.

Since last April PAYG has been "up to 8MB". Whenever the MaxDSL upgrades
have been talked about it has been stated that users on up to 4MB and up
to 8MB would have priority. It would be reasonable therefore to assume
that PAYG users would have priority. Further, it was explicitly stated
in a post by Dave Tomlinson on the portal forums on 14 Oct 2005 which
included (my bold):

<quote>From there, in spring next year BT will be rolling out DSL Max to
all their active exchanges. As soon as we can we will be upgrading
customers to the appropriate speeds their line/exchange will support
starting with free regrades for PAYG/Lite, and customers on the
up to 4/8Mbps accounts.</quote>

Full post: http://users.plus.net/QL:C0FE60F9

They are now saying that no priority will be given to PAYG over the
users who were on Premier and BB+ up to 2MB.

I accept that Premier (and the few BB+) users who were paying higher
rates for up to 4MB and up to 8MB "to be at the front of the queue"
should have absolute priority, and have suggested PAYG users should come
next in the pecking order, but this has been rejected.

So yet again Plusnet have been spinning and raising false expectations.
It's no small wonder they're so good at it - they've had so much practice.

--
John
Former Member of Plusnet Usergroup

On 06 Apr 2006 10:48, jelv <(E-Mail Removed)-o-m> wrote:

>Firstly we have the fiasco over the free overnight usage. A newsletter
>was sent to all users saying that from the first billing date after 30th
>March midnight to 8am would be free. NOT TRUE - at least for some users.
>
>PAYG users billed 31st March, 1st & 2nd April will not get free
>overnight until their next billing date (beginning of May).

I see a comment on ADSLguide about e-mail having gone out to those who
get service status messages - not the actual customers who were billed
of course - seems yet another example of bad communication from the PN
"Comms Team" to me. As for what has gone out, it gives some apology,
yet they seem to be unable to consider handling the product change
for those whose billing has gone through, yet they will do this
for people billed 04/05/06 April.

Seems myopic in the extreme, to be able and willing to handle account
changes for one set, but just ignore the people that have been told
one thing, and not had their accounts changed, despite that being
in line with what was scheduled. I doubt there will be a response
to my query asking why, if they're doing these product changes for a
set of customers, they cannot do it for those billed before 03/04 too.

On 06 Apr 2006 14:28 I wrote:

> I doubt there will be a response to my query asking why, if they're
> doing these product changes for a set of customers, they cannot do
> it for those billed before 03/04 too.

Well, I'm very pleased to see they have come up with a solution, even
if it did seem to take a few days of criticism about this problem :-

From one of the plusnet.service.* newsgroups posted sometime after mine:

"We couldn't move everyone who's billing date falls between 31st March
and 7th April as this equates to more than 30,000 customers. The forced
disconnect would cause issues when everyone tried to reconnect.

To resolve this we are trialling (emphasis on trialling!) a solution
tomorrow. Tomorrow, 07/04/06, we will move all PAYG customers whose
billing date is 31/03/06 and ALL customers whose billing date is 07/04/06.

Should this be successful we will move onto PAYG customers billed on
01/04/06 and ALL customers whose bill date is 08/04/06 and so on."

A "thank you" to whomever in Plus.Net had the commonsense to accept that
it could be done, and just needed a bit of planning to consider how best
to achieve it. I didn't expect all could be done in one go, yet it does
seem that even with the suggested solution, PN has ignored a way to work
through the backlog more fairly... doing 31/03 and 01/04 tomorrow, and a
day later to do 02/04 and the next day, and so on. It looks likely that
PN will get round to doing people from today on Wednesday next week, yet
a person billed tomorrow will have their account changed tomorrow, too.


--
Quality e-mail... 10 GB mailbox, 1 GB files, 30 day free trial !
IMAP/SMTP/POP/WAP or point your MX. See <http://2238.runbox.com>

poster wrote:

Although they have formulated a sensible plan to resolve the free
midnight to 8am issue for those who's billing date has passed, we don't
appear to be any further on with reneging on the commitment to upgrade
8MB users (which included PAYG).

--
John
Former Member of Plusnet Usergroup

On 06 Apr 2006 20:05, jelv <(E-Mail Removed)-o-m> wrote:

>we don't appear to be any further on with reneging on the commitment
>to upgrade 8MB users (which included PAYG).

and it looks like a unilateral decision has been made to pi$$ off all
those with long-held accounts (3+ years) by determining that the time
of switching to ADSL is going to give the order for regrading Premier
accounts, when that finally happens. Seems quite funny one moderator
was saying "it's getting a bit personal" (suggesting a team leader is
being "got at") when the way I saw some earlier postings it looked as
if the team leader was suggesting misinformation had been given by CS
or Comms Team people in the time before he was team leader and that a
lot of comments were "mistaken" or something. Talk about how to take
morale to an all time low - new boss makes public announcement that a
bunch of people were all mistaken - because the comments they made do
not fit with the current thinking - his thinking, perhaps - on how to
pi$$ off users big time - by throwing out the previous statements now
calling them misinformed and lifting the goal posts off the ground...