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Moving house with Plus? Be careful!

Lo ppl this might be so obvious you will laugh but I personally have great concerns about this...

Before I start my rant I need to let you know this - Plusnet in my opinion/experience are amazing! they supply all our work and home connections and its FANTASTIC! in the 4 years weve used them weve had very little problems.

Anyways to the point, I went to swap my mum's broadband (cos she moved house) in the Plusnet Portal and went through the set of tools they provide.

I knew about their recent introduction of new packages so I click the tick box that said 'Upgrade my Package', it took me to a page to choose tariffs etc then to the next page which is the bit that I have concern about...

*****************************************
Fixed cost or pay as you go?

You are currently: Pay as you go

If you use your usage allowance, your speeds will be restricted to 128k until the end of the billing month. If you think you might use more than your allowance, simply tick this box to get extra usage at your normal speed for £1 per GB. [x]

*****************************************

...when the page loaded the tick box was already ticked! please realise I know people have to read whats in front of them and its clearly states they will be charged extra, but people dont! and my mum certainly didnt undertsand, she doesnt use the internet.

I have 2 younger sisters that live at my mums and they use the net for everything and tend to use over the amount of the cap youtubing and download music, but usually if the cap comes into force they can still check emails, search google for school work etc, talk to their friends on MSN etc etc

If the tick box is ticked as standard, people 'might' go straight through the process and without knowing sign up for the £1 per GB option as my mum did!

Now if I didnt know she did this and didnt checked it afterwards she would have been debited a HUGE amount from her bank without even realising, and not everyone checks their banks regularly and a month would have gone by before she would of noticed, the possibilities are exponential for the unwise surfer.

As I said up top, this is probably not anything to write home about but I thought i'd share the experience and hope others read this before naively falling for the same issue.

Any thoughts?
 
Perhaps it would have been better to leave both options blank and force the user to choose an option before progressing, but TBH I don't see too much to shout about here.

As you said, the onus is on the user to read and understand the options before clicking - if +Net had tried to hide details or mislead the user, the I would have agreed, but they didn't.

If anything I think +Net deserve credit for being so up front about their charges, rather than going down the vague FUP or false 'unlimited' route.
 
Agreed, its just the contradiction in terms that bugs me...

"simply tick this box to ..." though its already ticked, I cant hep but imagine people rushing through this thinking it must be right.
 
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i suppose someone who doesn't read the terms of a contract they sign up for deserves what they get. I mean you wouldn't sign up for a loan without reading the paperwork, you wouldn't sign up to a mobile contract without reading the costs involved etc etc.
 
Just to put a different slant on this. If the box wasn't ticked and the person didn't read the page properly then they would be complaining when their line was throttled when they exceeded their limit. Plusnet however do give you an option to cap the amount you will be billed so you can have the best of both worlds. I.e additional GBs when you need it but never spending more than you want to pay in anyone month.
 
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I think for once an ISP is trying to be more honest with it's customers - it would be a better idea to force the customer to choose, rather than pre-select an option, and maybe add a link to the bill-capping on the same page, but my view is that at least the info about their caps & throttling is easily available.

Whilst I have no intention of joining +N, hats off to them for being clear about what their service offers - and doesn't offer!
 
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