OneGuyFromBarlick

Thought this may interest some of you. Plusnet is introducing a raft of price increases in September, which will significantly affect its broadband and home phone customers.

As of September 2nd, the telecoms provider will hike the price of its line rental from £15.95 - which is currently one of the lowest amounts charged by any major broadband provider - to £16.99 a month. Those who prefer to pay line rental upfront to save money will be subject to an even bigger rise in relative terms, with the 12-month block payment rising from £155.88 (equivalent to £12.99 a month) to £185.88 (equivalent to £15.49). Though customers paying upfront will continue to benefit from a discount, they will effectively be paying £2.50 extra each month for the privilege compared to the previous deal, while those paying on a monthly service will see prices rise by £1.04.

Plusnet is also rolling out price increases across many of its call tariffs, with the Evening and Weekends package increasing from £2.00 per month to £3.00 per month on September 2nd, and the Anytime calls deal rising from £5.00 per month to £6.00 per month.

Other charges will include the call set-up fee increasing from 15p to 16p per call, while Plusnet has also warned that other call rates may change.

The increases are not restricted to calls and line rental, however, with Postage & Packaging for its routers rising from £5.99 to £6.99, and early termination charges also set to rise, based on the size of each consumer's package.

It marks yet another round of changes to affect Plusnet customers, who were recently informed that the company was cutting the upload speed on the 38Mb Unlimited Fibre package from 19.5Mb to 2Mb, while the provider has also announced it is scaling back its 24/7 UK based phone support to 7:30am to 10:30pm, seven days a week.

Well - you've rained on my parade there Kev. I've heard nothing yet, but my total payment last month was about £20, down from the usual £28. They even sent me a refund of £85 recently since they had been overcharging me for the last year.
I have line rental, unlimited broadband, (not fibre optic), and anytime phone package.

I vaguely remember fixing it for a period last time I phoned them, so maybe I'm protected. I think that's quite good value. Not sure about the down;load speed - it seems quite fast enough for my aging brain to cope with.

I get the suspicion that these complicated packages are designed to allow small increases of the elements. I hate the termination charges that's why I leave my Talktalk package alone, it's running at a max of £30 a month if I have been heavy on the calls to about £25 and that includes the free international package. It suits me and I have freedom to grab a deal if I am so inclined.... Still cheaper than the old days.....

Kev's information is correct and was sent out by Plusnet to it's subscribers by email on 29th June and therefore Tripps should have received it too. The message was titled `Important information about your Plusnet service' although, strangely, the header in the message body was `Important information about your award-winning home phone'. It arrived while I was in the middle of email correspondence with Plusnet asking them for a better deal on my account. So far everything they've offered me requires me to accept an 18 month contract, which I'm not willing to do - I currently have no fixed time contract with them. I've told them that an 18-month contract is the last thing I want when they've just lost my loyalty by letting me languish on a slow speed and an increasing monthly charge. They used to be great but now...not so good.

I wasn't too pleased that they took 5 days to respond to my initial enquiry via their online helpdesk then on the 28th June quoted some alternative deals, all with 18-month contracts, but on the following day announced prices rises that put all the figures they gave me out of date. They didn't mention the price rises in their response. They also said that fibre was now available in our rural backwater but they didn't tell me at the time it became available.

Sorry the gloss is going off Plusnet for you. Didn't I see a post pointing out that they were actually a branch of EE? All these companies are on the same track, they want to lock you on a fixed contract and get everything off them including TV. I resist them. Also the incredible offers (on the surface) that BT and Sky are pushing. I don't trust them.....

Plusnet are an arm of BT, but since BT recently bought EE, its all turning into one big company....

Somewhat Ironic since I originally joined Orange to get away from BT. It morphed into EE and was then bought out by BT. We won't talk about all the morphing that went on since Freeserve.....

BT are on their way to being a huge empire we love to hate, like Apple,Microsoft and Google.

Ahhh, Freeserve. I started my online career with them after a false start with a local provider called 'Terntech' who seemed to die out. I had a Freeserve email account until I switched to Orange and then Talktalk. Funny thing is I kept my original Freeserve address right up to when I went on Talktalk. Who owns them? Am I unwittingly a customer of BT?

Terntech, there's a blast from the past. Run out of an old mill in Nelson, off the B&Q roundabout somewhere.......

Talktalk are independant, took over Pipex and Tiscali in the past.

I started with Demon in 1994 and they were a good company until Scottish Power took them over and it all went belly up. They couldn't get me better than 1Mbps broadband speed and then they sent the debt collectors after us, claiming we owed them £5. Yes, £5! We always paid on time, in full, so we asked the debt collector for proof of the debt and they couldn't get anything out of Demon. It pleased me to think that Demon probably had to pay the debt collector more than £5 for chasing us. We moved to Plusnet, they sent in the engineers and we were quickly on 6Mbps. With Plusnet we've almost never been offline except for the odd occasions in the morning when the router needed restarting. When Plusnet was absorbed into BT the deal was that PN would continue with its own staff, offices and business model independently of BT. This seemed to be the case until the last year or so when they've begun to shift to the usual cynical `stuff loyalty' business models.

There used to be several other small internet providers and I wonder if any of them still exist. I can't remember the names but they were the types of business that stared in the back of a garage. I suppose they were all bought out by BT!

I thought it was just me that had this problem with Flash and Firefox, but it seems it's everyone.

Firefox Flash problem

I hit the Flash block yesterday but assumed it was an extra level of security, I took the by-pass option and everything worked normally but this morning there has been a Flash update from Canonical which of course I have deployed. I'll report what has happened if I hit it.



I got this email this morning. Looks like a phishing scam to me. If it isn't it is very inept marketing. Am I right? Needless to say I haven't taken advantage of their kind offer.....

Although the From address is orders@amazon.co.uk it doesn't mean it necessarily comes from Amazon. The From address can be spoofed. I suspect the `Load my account' button is to get you to put in your details including password which would then go to the scammer or would transfer you to a scam site. If you close the email message then open your Amazon account the usual, safe way I doubt you will find a £100 credit offered in your account - but that's the ultimate way to check!

That's what I think Tiz. I am a funny old bugger, I never take 'free offers'. There's no such thing as a free lunch!

Regarding Flash and Mozilla, Flash is long overdue for being killed off, there are newer and better ways of achieving the same thing. Any reasonable browser nowadays will do HTML5 which will do all that flash does.

Youtube now do most of their videos in HTML5 but it needs to be enabled or it will default to Flash. You can enable html5 by going to https://www.youtube.com/html5 and clicking on the link there. It saves to having to enable Flash in Firefox for youtube at least.

Canonical updated Firefox yesterday on my system.....

The county council social worker has assessed my dad as needing to go into a nursing home and she has sent me several files as email attachments. I think they are forms to be filled in describing my dad's history and needs. But it's not quite so simple. I can't open the files, they have a .switch ending and require special software called Egress Switch which need MS windows as the OS. The email says this method is used to ensure security. The alternative is offered to go to the company's web site and view the documents online but to do this I would be forced to register with the company, give them personal information and agree to their T&Cs, which include allowing them to distribute my details among their `subsidiary companies'. The company of course hopes that anyone who registers will then `upgrade' to a paid subscription. I've asked the social worker to send the files as normal Word files or as PDF files but every time she tries they arrive here as .switch files. It looks like she's locked into this new system and everything gets converted to Switch files.

I've now written back and told her that I think it's wrong for a public service to force the public to register with a commercial profit-making company in order to communicate with them. By being restricted to MS Windows it's also playing into the hands of MS. They'll have to send the documents by post if they can't use normal emails and Word files now.

I agree with you Tiz. Fight the buggers. At the root it is either a deliberate strategy to force you to register on their system or an indication that they don't really understand what they are doing. Ask her to scan the forms and send as a .jpg. That isn't system dependent so they have no excuse.

My impression is that they don't have that level of independence as far as computing goes. I guess they are on a council or NHS network and are restricted to what the `system' offers them. It probably saves documents in certain specific formats approved by the IT people. The social workers may not even be able to print out documents or scan them. They won't even mention my dad's name in their email messages and just put his initials. I get these present messages with titles such as `UY_A_This is Me_XY'. It's a wonder they don't get trashed as spam. These messages with the .switch file attachments have only an official generic body text. The only way I know they come from the social worker is her email address in the `From' line. This is what's known as `progress' and we are supposed to be impressed!

Tizer wrote:These messages with the .switch file attachments have only an official generic body text.

The all point is that 'Switch' is a maximum security system." Ref. Egress Switch protects your data using AES (Rijndael) with a 256-bit key length and FIPS 140-2 libraries.
Every package created is protected with a unique encryption key. All communication between the Switch Client and Switch Server is secured using SSL."

This means that only people like GCHQ, America, Russia and China can read them. Its tough luck that the ordinary Joe has to stand on his head to read something that possibly nobody else is interested in.

' Oh what a tangled web we weave....' Originally meant to highlight the dangers of deceit but entirely applicable here....
Weasel words and obfuscation are routinely used as a defence against the buck coming home.... Always leave yourself a way out. That's why face to face discussion of specifics is seen as dangerous today. Look at the bank's and large corporation's attitude to customers...

plaques wrote:This means that only people like GCHQ, America, Russia and China can read them. Its tough luck that the ordinary Joe has to stand on his head to read something that possibly nobody else is interested in.

Precisely that, Plaques. Thanks for enunciating it in such pithy words. As I understand it, all they are trying to send me is blank forms. It's quite likely that even if I could access the forms on my PC I may not be able to complete and upload them online. And anyway, all that I'd be putting in the forms would be some of the life history and preferences of a 96-year-old man with dementia who has no bank account, credit card, passwords, etc etc. Sledgehammer to crack a nut. A triumph of bureaucracy over common sense. I'm beginning to wonder too whether or not my email messages sent to the social worker ever reach her - she doesn't reply to them and I have to telephone her. We could be in the 1960s! You have to laugh or you'd cry.

Thankfully our vicar and the funeral director are fully up to speed with emails and the technology to produce the Order of Service sheets for the funeral.A poem has been winged off to the vicar so she is aware and will have the words if needed to step in. Eulogy is being prepared which will also be sent to the vicar although a family member will deliver it, and the words of the chosen hymns and musical choices have been passed to the funeral director. We just have the pictures to sort now, these also will go to Carl who will pull the whole lot together and provide the required number of service sheets which will be available in the church on Friday.

The other day, within my dads stuff I came across what was produced for my granddads funeral in 1940. It's a small envelope about the size of a credit card containing a black edged white card with date, time and place of funeral and the name of the deceased, that's it, the cards were locally printed and hand delivered to friends and family. Service would be the standard burial text with maybe a reading from a family member or friend. At the time, my dad got compassionate leave to attend from his posting in Iceland. he got home two days after his dad had been buried. He had two hours at home, just enough time for his mum to feed him and to call down to Ghyll to see his dads grave, then 4 days journey to get back to Reykjavik, he had a delayed sailing from Glasgow so was AWOL by 1 day by the time he reported back and spent the next two weeks on a charge, prison and kitchen duty. How times change.

That sounds like the army Ian....
Tiz, I share with you dislike of the predilection of some people not to acknowledge communications. MY motto was always "When in doubt, over-communicate!" Pity this isn't included in the job description of every official....
Canonical sent out a flash player update yesterday. I think it might have cured the ban.....

Thanks to Canonical for more upgrades. Was it Thunderbird?

80mb of Linux upgrades this morning from Canonical. As usual no problems and very fast. It's like having your own IT support section beavering away in the background. Wonderful service.....