Results tagged “charges” from Birmingham Mail - Technobabble

As a customer of Plusnet I am used to getting emails advising me of 'changes to my terms and conditions'.

Recently one included informing me of a new charge to terminate my service - nice given that when I signed up I had to agree to pay a penalty for leaving within a set period.

But after about three years with them this has now reduced to nothing - but now they've just decided to impose a blanket £20 fee.

There was another one a year or so ago informing me of a change to my download limits.

When I signed up with Plusnet for their plus package there were none, but this changed to 4gb 'peak' and 40gb 'off peak' a month ('peak' it transpires is whenever you actually want to download something...).

I never bust it or come anywhere near, because I don't really download much apart from software patches (although due to the buggy nature of some games these can be pretty huge some times [are you listening EA?]).

EA recently distributed the excellent Spore to journalists thorough their download system, as opposed to sending out a physical copy.

The 3.5gb file was pretty huge and I noticed afterwards that my internet was moving rather slowly - in fact my dial up connection from years ago would have put it to shame.

So I contacted Plusnet via their online customer service, and got a quick response - I'd busted my download limit for 'peak' times and they'd punished me by throttling back my broadband speed.

BUT they instantly waived the restriction (not permanently) and opened my account back up again, which was nice, but also possibly because they realised I'd been unfairly punished - after all I'd never before come remotely close to doing it before.

For me it just threw into stark relief the powers of companies for changing their conditions.

A key point for me with signing up to Plusnet was the no download limits - I just don't like feeling I'm operating on a rationed service, although I'm not a big data hog.

But they just changed it and sent me an email, just like changing the 'switchover' charges.

So the lesson may be - read the small print when you sign up to something - just so you know what it was when they change it.

And now with Plusnet if I decide to take my only recourse as a customer and clear off, they've changed the T&C so I get charged for that too.

Mobile giant Vodafone have hit the headlines for ramping up their minimum phone charges by an eye-watering 25 per cent - and not telling their customers.

Basically if you're on that network you will have received an insert in your bill last month detailing the prices - but not saying that they'd actually gone up.

Calls to 08 numbers like the free to landlines 0800 and the not so free 0845 are going up by even more - 30 per cent.

It's pretty underhand - and after all when you sign up to a deal, say, for 12 months as part of a package with a new handset, you would do so knowing what the charges would be

OK so prices go up - but if you're doing it by such a huge amount then stating so, rather than trying to sneak it out, should be how a responsible and honest big business should act.

Next time you get any letter laying out what you're paying, I suggest you compare it to what you were paying before.

You just can't trust companies to tell you that they're changing things - a pretty poor state of affairs.

Below: Vodafone - check your bill because you can't rely on this company to be entirely clear about the small matter of putting up charges by the small matter of a quarter.