Other Cancelling plusnet, 4G broadband instead?

Hi all,
Having read this thread I thought I'd look at cancelling plusnet (since we're now paying £31/month for ADSL after the 18month contract ran out or something I can't remember, we were in theory only being here a couple of months after it ran out so I didn't care, obviously things have changed a little)

However I can't find any emails about my contract/account at all, and can't seemingly can't login, can't do forget my password as none of my emails seem to work, and so last night I was considering just cancelling the DD, which I know isn't really the done thing, but wondered if it might be ok?

Will try to ring them today but as a general rule I dislike phoning companies at the best of times, let alone when I seemingly have no information about my account other than seeing the DD go every month!

Assuming I can't get anything sorted without having information such as account details, would just cancelling the DD work? (assuming I'm out of the initial contract and on a rolling one now)

Thanks,
George

Edit:
As expected they couldn't do anything over the phone without information from me which I don't have, so apparently I can write to them saying I want to cancel, wonders of technology eh.

 

Isn't the DD payment reference your account no., in some way shape or form?

 

Cancelling the DD isn't the same as cancelling your contract - you're just cancelling the payment, you'll still owe Plusnet money. As Jeff mentioned, the DD reference is probably your contract/customer number, so you could try ringing them and quoting that number to see where you get.

Failing that, cancelling the DD will probably result in some kind of missive telling you that you've missed a payment - and, hopefully, somewhere on that missive you'll find your customer reference

 

When I cancelled them years ago I had none of my details. I called them, they asked for the phone number address and post code (and my name) and they sorted it there and then on the phone.

 

Yeah if I'd known the phone number I think I could have got it sorted but we've never had a phone connected so I've no idea what it is hah!

 

Never hurts to have a (burner) landline device in a cupboard, somewhere... plug it into the socket & call/'prank' a known/easily remembered mobile no. - the landline no. will appear.

Should also be on any paper bill you get...

 

I odn't get a paper bill, for anything these days, as its just so wasteful!

 

Yeah only time I get paper bills is by accident/something rare I didn't even realise existed hah.
Going to try again tomorrow to see if I can get this sorted, otherwise will write them a letter to post on Tuesday probably!

Sky deal at £20 a month for 4g is too tempting not to give a go.

 

So managed to get through to them today with a combination of payment details etc.
Turns out I remembered part of my username and they had my email as .com instead of .co.uk!

So they've offered a £17.99/month for ADSL, with potential to upgrade to fibre when we move at £21.99 I think it was.

But I'm still tempted to try the Sky 4G deal at £20 a month, thought I'd get some opinions though.

4G should be higher upload than both, and higher download than ADSL, potentially slower download than fibre but not by a huge amount?

 

Depends where you live. For me, in the centre of Bristol in peak student times the 4G slows to a crawl! So it's not always the best solution.

 

4G is also massively dependant on the receiving hardware and placement thereof.

Like using EE's bundled router in the wrong place I could get 5Mbit down, and using my own Huawei B525 in the right place, 120Mbit.

The speed estimates from the networks are nigh on useless - will only really tell you if you will or won't be able to get a serviceable signal, no more. Unfortunately the only way to really know is to try it, so make sure you have recourse if you're not happy with the service early on if you go for 4G.

I did create a thread with all of my ups and downs of switching from ropey ADSL to 4G, can't seem to find the right search terms for it atm though.

EDIT: Found it, might be something of use here - https://forums.bit-tech.net/index.p...nd-tribulations-of-wireless-broadband.341972/

 

I think the sky offer includes a B535 at the moment, which I think is half decent. And yeah I'm not expecting 80/30 (which is what I got the other day from a quick speedtest on my phone) due to timing and it being a different network, but tested a couple of others, including my brother who's using Sky (via Smarty) up in Stirling and he got 44/18 which was better than I'd expected to be honest. I know time of day will vary things as well, but unless it's 15/2 or something (which would still be an improvement!) I can't see myself being too mad.

Going to try and do some more testing and have a look at the sky terms and conditions a little to see if there are any guaranteed speeds etc.

 

have a look at smarty, £20 unlimited, data cap at 1000gb per month. i've had good results for a few customers!

 

I use Smarty(3) and Sky(O2) both seem pretty good on the whole, interestingly I moved from 3 to smarty and got better download speeds, work that out??

The sky signal seems a bit more ropey for our area of Bristol according to my missus who I also had on 3 previously but we are tied in for the mo, she does like the banking data ability as suits the missus so she is sticking, so it can't be that bad but I think the best advice is to try all the networks in your area via pay and go contracts or non committal stuff like smarty which are rolling one month before tying into something long term.

If you are at the point of switching providers then consider the cashback sites as you might find you can get fibre quite cheap, I switched all my contracts mobiles/house phone broadband etc end of last year and I have ended up with Skys full package of TV and Max Fibre broadband for less than I was paying BT for phone and slow broad band, nevermind Netflix etc, of course out of contract in 18 months it will go up by 3x but I'll just switch to someone else, or cancel.

If fibre is not in your area yet then I would wait, fibre is a more reliable experience than mobile broadband interms of latency and speeds.

With respect to Smarty they have a 100Gb offer for £15 at the mo, ends tomorrow or unlimited as mentioned above for £20, again no lock in you can leave when you want.

Smarty referral link if you are tempted gets you a free month and me.
http://referme.to/Xb3Toix

 

Yeah I thought of Smarty first, until realising 4g routers are kind of pricey it seems and so £20 a month including one suddenly seems like a pretty good deal even with the long term.
Haven't decided yet and may have a look if I could get a router 2nd hand for a decent price, but as @Mister_Tad said, there seems to be quite a difference in the quality of the router to what you end up getting speeds wise, and I think the B535 is half decent (at least from a quick google it should be based on the price!)

 

Well thought I'd give this thread bit of an update.

Went for the £20/month offer from 3, and have been using it for the past couple of days as a test before cancelling plusnet.

Seemingly on average I get 25-40 down and 20-30 up based on speedtest.net.
Averaged 3.5-4.5MB/s (peaking at 5) when downloading something from Steam as a longer test (was a couple of GB).

Haven't played around with positioning of the router, just sat on the windowsill next to where the previous one was basically.
Haven't got the pi-hole working with it yet which is something I do want to try and sort, but other than that feeling fairly positive.

Have been a couple of times where sites would load really slowly/failed to load even though I could be streaming other stuff with no indication of a drop in quality due to bandwidth issues, so need to try and work out what's going on there.

 

I'm on Plusnet and Tesco Mobile. Using the phone, got 23.1Mbps down and 5.1Mbps up using Plusnet but on mobile, got 3.9Mbps down and the upload test failed also, the latency was more than 3 times slower. Mobile BB is not going to happen here anytime soon.

 

Well as I said it seems to be working ok in general for me, far quicker than what I was getting previously, ping is worse but I haven't played online games for a while now so don't see that being much of an issue

 

So been doing a little bit of reading this morning and it seems to be a super common problem with three 4g home broadband connections.

'Speeds' are good, but there is often a lot of 'lag' to connections, with pages failing to load etc, and it seems to be due to some trickery being done by three? (some kind of packet inspection, I notice when I do a tracert I get multiple request timeouts everytime which doesn't sound right to me)

Trying a free vpn to see if that solves it as others have said it did, since then three couldn't manage the traffic using deep packet inspection as it was all as one continuous connection (or something like that).

Will be annoyed if this does solve it and will be contacting three about it.

 

Another update, noticed my first bill was rather high, saw it was because it was a month and a bit fair enough, but then realised my 'standard' bill will be £29 not £20, seemingly can't find any emails or texts or anything saying what I actually ordered!

Going to try and contact 3 today and find out what's going on.