Customers of UK ISP Plusnet Face Several Months of Backdate Bills

The fallout from last year’s troubled migration to a new billing platform has continued after broadband ISP Plusnet confirmed that, in yet another blunder, their system failed to take payments from hundreds of customers for a period of several months. As a result some subscribers are about to be hit with a large backdated bill.

Over the past year we’ve reported on various billing problems at the provider, all of which seem to stem from last September’s troubled effort to migrate their old billing system to a “brand-new” platform (here). Some of the gripes we’ve seen since earlier this year also involved customers who noticed that they had not been billed correctly or were not being billed at all, although clearly this issue hasn’t been fully resolved for some.. until now.

The good news, according to MSE, is that customers’ will not receive a negative mark on their credit files for Plusnet’s mistake and if a customer’s payments weren’t taken for more than three months, then the rest of their unpaid bills should be written off (effectively giving some subscribers a period of free service).

A Spokesperson for Plusnet said:

“We’ve worked hard to fix the issues and during this time we haven’t billed these customers.

We are now contacting these customers to let them know we will be restarting their bills. We want to reassure customers their first bill from us will only contain backdated charges for a maximum of the last three months, and any charges for periods longer than this have been written off free of charge.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience we have caused these customers.”

A quick look at Ofcom’s most recent consumer complaints data shows the impact that the billing fiasco has had on Plusnet, which between Q4 2018 and Q1 2019 was the most complained about of all the largest broadband and phone providers (here). In Q1 2019 almost four in ten of Plusnet’s complaints were about billing, pricing and charges (38% of complaints).