End of contract

[kinetic747]

I'm coming towards the end of my contract and I can get FTTP, but my god the "offer" I'm getting from BT to stay is shocking. If I want 500mb/s it's £7 per month more expensive than Sky, £11 more than Vodafone, £4 more than Plusnet and £7 more than Virgin. I've just tried to phone retentions but there's a 45 minute wait. Does anyone know the best time to phone, and also if it's likely I'll be offered a better deal than the one I can see in MyBT?

There was a deal showing yesterday at £36/month with complete WiFi but that's now disappeared.

[rbz5416]

What you get from retentions appears to be a complete lottery. My contract expires next month & I've tried retentions twice. On both occasions the "very best price" was exactly the same as that offered in MyBT, an extra 11%.

Having now moved into the final 30 days, the "very best price" in MyBT has now increased by £5 & almost to Zen levels. While every day on these forums we see the continual downward spiral of anything vaguely resembling customer service or support.

I'm just counting down the the last 14 days when I'll place an order elsewhere.

[kinetic747]

Very disappointing isn't it? It's as though they've given up competing. 

[rbz5416]

It's always been BT policy to prioritise the recruitment of new customers at the expense of the existing. You just have to play the game too. Use a cashback site to do a comparison & get a much better deal with cashback too. Then at the end of that contract, maybe come back to BT, where they'll welcome you with new customer discounts & cashback offers. It's madness but just the way it works.

[pippincp]

Hopefully OTS will change that and ISP's will concetrate more on keeping customers. Then again pigs might fly.

[ney]

I left BT over 18 months ago at the end of my contract and had been with BT well over 20 years. After BT never offered me much of a discount for my FTTC and I would have been paying £7 more a month for a similar package to the one I was on and that was with a 10% discount.

I  moved to Sky FTTC and have saved £14 a month compared to BT. Just the other week I got a similar deal with them when my contract had come to an end and on the same FTTC package. So I'm still with Sky for FTTC.
Depends who you get on the phone but BT seem to offer most of there deals and discounts to new customers.

[kinetic747]

I've decided to leave now after 30 years as it's unlikely they'll match any of the competition. I now have to decide who to go with and I'm wavering between Vodafone (cheapest) and Plusnet who seem to have the best CS.

[rbz5416]

@kinetic747 

I spent 17 days with Vodafone a while back before jumping ship, they were truly awful. I think @naylor2006 had a similarly bad experience.

I've been with Plusnet a few times & they were OK but two things to bear in mind. They no longer provide any telephony & it's still a BT group business. So will likely be subject to Alison Kirkby's hatchet swinging to cut jobs & costs.

[kinetic747]

If you don't mind me asking who are you with now? My daughter and dad are both with Vodafone without issues, but they haven't had to phone CS yet.

[naylor2006]

Maybe take a look at Aquiss....you have to provide your own router but it has so many other benefits such as no price increases during contract, a shorter contract period, so you can leave and come back to someone else as a new customer again sooner getting new customer prices again.

The best way to approach Broadband renewal is nearly always moving to a new provider taking up new customer prices, but as @rbz5416 I would steer clear of Vodafone. They were consistently the cheapest when I was looking for an FTTP provider moving away from Virgin cable after Openreach completed their network around here. Everyone said their support was bad and entirely offshore, I was coming from Virgin though, how bad could it be....bad, very. There is a reason they are the cheapest and I assume its because their entire support structure for residential is cheap.

If you never need support then great, but if you do whether its about a fault or accounting you are limited to a chat bot before getting through to a human who will, without fail, ask you to confirm the same thing you confirmed 400 times before getting anywhere else. Everytime I reached support it was a solid 45 minutes before anything that could be deemed as constructive occurred. It was driving me crazy. The other thing that stinks is that you dont get access to your account until your broadband goes live, that was what I was told, so you cant log in to My Vodafone to view order status etc, you just get your two emails when you order and a date for install, if anything goes wrong its going to be hell. I left within the cooling off period for my own mental health, I needed to cool off.

You didnt ask me specifically but im am with BT but I am a new customer still ish....I will be going through this in 18 months and ill probably go Aquiss for a year losing my TV and relying on app based TV then returning to EE I expect if they still have the same decent pricing they have now.