Broadband and phone line for £16.99 a month from Plusnet
Tuesday 05 August 2008 09:59:09 by Andrew Ferguson
Broadband appears to be one of those few products where year on year cost savings have become normal. Plusnet is pruning the price of its basic offering with the launch of Plusnet Essentials which is a £16.99 package that offers an up to 8Mbps ADSL service, 1GB of inclusive usage allowance (top-ups at £1.25 per GB, and unmetered usage between midnight and 8am), telephone line rental and inclusive weekend calls to UK landlines and other Plusnet customers.
The pricing is not an introductory offer but rather the ongoing price, so there will be no surprise rise in price a few months down the road. The product also eschews the trend for ever longer contracts, with a 12 month minimum contract length.
A 1GB usage allowance is fairly small, but with each extra 1GB costing £1.25, for people doing the basic things of paying bills and doing their banking online and general bargain hunting this will be more than enough.
What is possible with a 1GB usage allowance.
- Surfing and instant messaging (e.g. MSN), 4 hours a day
- Email with attachments, 15 a week
- Email, 100 a week
- Downloading songs and short video, 10 a week
- Listen to online radio, 2 hours a week
When one considers that if you opt for a £10 a month mobile data dongle, if you exceed the usage allowance extra usage may be automatically charged at anything from £15 per GB to £100 per GB, one can see how landline broadband still has a clear advantage, even though you have to pay for the phone line rental.
The call tariffs are detailed on the Plusnet website, the key points being a 6p per call set up fee, calls to mobiles at 11.5p per minute during the day and 6.5p in the evenings. Chargeable calls to 01, 02 and 03 numbers cost 4p per minute.
The £6.99 broadband element from Plusnet Essentials is not available on its own, the cheapest broadband only package without an inclusive line rental deal is Option 1 for £9.99 per month which includes 2GB of usage allowance.
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I think it's quite competitive.
Compare it with the BT rental of £10.50 including weekend calls, and the BB side is only £6.49. Add 2GB >> 3GB it's £8.99. My newnet is £11.95 (annual contract).
Some people with specific interests will be happy to move to them but there will be a lot of disappointed faces if they dont read the terms and conditions Plusnet are one of the major traffic shapers.ISP's are finding it tougher to find people who only want a basic service.
Quite - my parents manage 2-3GB a month and have a service with a limit of 10GB for very little more than Plusnet are offering.
quote"1GB of inclusive usage allowance"
and they still havent learned.
isps will find it hard pressed to get customers who do under 1 gig a month now days, and plusnet are going after the wrong market, the people who want sub £10 will go with one of the big boys probably BT, tiscali or sky. (bt only first 3 months but people fooled again and again)
Ive never really knew what type of moral ground to take with Plusnet. On the one hand when they mess up they do have the nerve to hold their hands up to things, on the other hand all their packages now seem to have ridiculously small, caps or ridiculous throttling at certain times... I also agree this package isnt going to help much, there are other choices for low use customers out there.
I also wish they and other ISPs wouldnt quote misleading nonsense like...
"Downloading songs and short video, 10 a week
Listen to online radio, 2 hours a week"
Id love to see how for example how someone could download 10 videos a week In HD from the likes of lets say gametrailers.com (a 3min HIGH DEF ID CALL THAT SHORT video from there weighs in near to the 60Mb mark) 10 of them a week for only 2 weeks and your monthly cap is well and truely GONE! About time nonsense like that stopped.
Interesting comments thanks guys, the one about videos is certainly fair - we need to be more specific there when we describe it.
We have plenty of customers who are happy to download overnight, so it doesn't count against their usage allowances.
Of course there's no problem if people want to pay for extra usage on a PAYG basis).I should also point out that we do have a product where all traffic gets priority and isn't slowed down at any time(Called Pro).
Ian
Plusnet Products Team
At the end of the day, comparing like for like, it's hard to find a better value IPStream based provider in my opinion. Longer term, 21CN should give us costs closer to the LLU boys so we match them on pricing, but that is still a way off.
well I would like to see a 1 or 3 month contract WITHOUT penalties for finishing at that time!!
I think the new BE £8 service beats it dead...
quote"I think the new BE £8 service beats it dead..."
It stomps on the plusnet offer, spits on it a little and then digs a hole and kicks it in....... To be fair though ianwild did say IPSTREAM PROVIDER
The dribbling nonsense about 10 short videos a week needs to go though. How long is short?
If i signed up i dont care what the GIG CAP is per month if i only managed to get 5 vids when they say i can have 10 a week from my 1 gig cap id be seriously aanoyed, and contract or not they wouldnt be getting any more money. Mis-advertise..... I miss payment, that simple.
All isp's are guilty of quoting mis-leading figures for how many mp3 etc you can download.Serious internet users avoid them like the plague and are willing to pay for a quality service which none of the traffic shapers can provide.
quote"All isp's are guilty of quoting mis-leading figures for how many mp3 etc"
My ISP doesnt tag imaginary amount of mp3s/videos onto their ad blub.
quote"Serious internet users avoid them like the plague and are willing to pay for a quality service which none of the traffic shapers can provide."
I just wish Plusnet and a few other half decent ISPs would stop it... They are better than that, just make things clear and accurate, if you are offering 1gig make it clear its not ideal for heavy downloading, dont try to confuse the issue with all this 10 short videos quote and other rubbish.
Not sure I see any real value in this. Although a Plusnet customer I get free calls 24/7 from Sky Talk for only a fiver a month. Plusnet now give me a "generous" 2Gb pm for a tenner too!