voip closing charges

[#1]

Ah well another of the things that would cause me to hesitate about moving from Plusnet when fibre reaches the village ( promised September) has just gone away.
As a market 1 exchange customer I am already paying a premium - one of the minor compensations (worth £4 of the £7/month?) was the (occasional) VOIP call. Without the VOIP there is probably no reason to stay with Plusnet and continue to subsidise the low low prices for markets 2 & 3.
It will be interesting to find out what happens to my existing credit.

[#2]

Re Credit see here: http://community.plus.net/voip-and-fax/

[#3]

i've filled in the form for gradwell to get in touch, see what they have to say. I'd like to be proven wrong, but I can't see them providing a very lost cost solution.

[#4]

That's my concern too.
As it's already setup I'd like to think there will not be a setup fee and as we all clearly have the equipment we won't need that either.
It would have been nice of the email from PN included more details of a change over package and potential charges we may incur.
I guess we shall all have to wait on Gradwell to call us. I tried to call them from the number on their webpage but it goes to an answerphone which is not promising.
podman

[#5]

calling the number in the pn email. Looks like they may have the same lengthy call waits.
going to have to hang up as i need to put kids to bed. guess i'll need to wait until they call me.

[#6]

I, too, have enjoyed the free 120-mins/month provided for so long by Gradwell after they took over the earlier Plusnet offering, which as I remember, included this benefit.
I have only used the service for outgoing calls, so a change of number is irrelevant.
Can anyone recommend an alternative reliable VoIP service?....Of course, I understand that there'll be no free calls!
Regards....
PS  Come to think of it, it may be best to exploit more the network contract used by my smartphone!

[#7]

Quote from: podman

It looks like there is not charge necessarily to take your number but some provider charge to IMPORT it and according to PN you could be without it for up to 10 days.

There's a misunderstanding crept in here - It can take 10 days to port the number but the downtime is minimal.

Quote from: podman

I trust we will not be forced to pay and inital fee or take their hardware as the prices for that alone make it cheaper for me to order a new landline. SUMMARY Telephone Package £4.00 / Month Minutes £0.00 / month Hardware £59.95 one-off Initial payment £113.95 Monthly thereafter £4.00 / month

Where have you got these prices from, especially the initial payment?

[#8]

Quote from: fotobits

Can anyone recommend an alternative reliable VoIP service?

I use Localphone for outgoing calls and Sipgate for incoming.  Look also at AAISP and Voipfone (though their pricing is a bit strange!)

[#9]

sipgate gives you one free geographical number

[#10]

Note that you can't port numbers to Sipgate anymore (at least not on their free residential service)

[#11]

Quote

are you still on the old premier type package that used to include it? I guess for those of us that have moved it's tough as it'll be said those perks carried across as goodwill and not part of the package / contract.

No I'm on Unlimited BUT when I recontracted it was confirmed that I would retain the existing Broadband Phone 120 package.
So far I've still not receieved any notification of the closure...

[#12]

So disappointed to learn this morning that another valuable adjunct to basic services is to bite the dust.  Fax2Email is to be terminated or passed out to a third party at a chargeable cost.
Rather seems that PlusNET are stripping services to the bone - why?  The attractiveness of the PlusNET offer used to be the richness of the package - web hosting, cgi, VOIP and now fax2email have over recent times been dumped - what next?
Does this apply to business accounts as well?  I've recently signed up a new business account and had every intention of using that service when the account activates - now rather disappointed!

[#13]

existing VoIP users are losing their service too - all accounts.

[#14]

I do not mean to sound like some PN minion defending every decision they make but as someone who deals with b2b every day and has done for the last 10 years, crikey I have not sent a fax for donkeys years and similarly nobody has wanted to send me a fax for donkeys years either, I understand there might be a very small number of people out there still using them but if this service is costing PN and only a very small amount of users are using it then surely you cannot berate them for making what would seem to be a sound financial decision?
Same with VOIP, again I run a number of VOIP lines through soho66 and voipstudio these people do nothing but VOIP, their service is relatively cheap and extremely reliable, is it really that much of a big deal? If you want a residential VOIP line you can go to sipgate and get one completely free with a geographical number, it will not cost you a single penny for incoming calls and upkeep, these guys specialise in these services why would you not want to use a specialist for such things?

[#15]

More grim news then.  
What else is on the cards for being dropped for existing users?  Web hosting? Email services?  Get rid of them and you no longer need domain hosting / name servers... Where will this all end?  Simple Internet connect and nothing else?  Is this why SSL work appears to have stopped?
Who is making these poor decisions?