Talk:Telecom Plus/Archives/2012

Critical testimonies: the “INutility Warehouse”
(To be edited and put in front page.)

Also called the “INutility Warehouse” (Calin in Moneysavingexpert, 20-04-2006, 9:13 PM)


 * Telecom Plus (and derived companies) seem to blow a lot of fluff to hide the fact that the "lower prices" claim is overinflated for normal customers - that is, people who do not get into economic proselytism (those who do not become "distributors").
 * In fact economic proselytism is inbuilt in the process of becoming a client, since one cannot become client without one actually paying for the need to gain more customers for the company. This is an essential characteristic of multi level marketing.
 * The sales techniques reflect this, with distributors not being upfront with the real costs nor with what they personally gain for acquiring more clients.
 * Clients are tied up in long-term contracts, and must pay a "penalty" to switch elsewhere.
 * The quality of service is very shoddy, in particular the broadband service with seriously reduced internet speeds and can entirely go down for about an hour.
 * The customer service (internet technical support) is expensive: an 0900 number often slow to answer, giving inadequate answers which force the client to call back, not acknowledging the lesser quality of their service - would rather have the client accept that lesser service as the norm, or that it's the client's fault.
 * Slow in reimbursing their overcharged customers.
 * It hides its price hitch-ups behind those of bigger companies.

References:
 * Gumtree forum thread - Working From Home?
 * Moneysupermarket forum thread - Utility Warehouse
 * Moneysavingexpert forum thread - Utility Warehouse

General critics
One must pay £25 upfront for a “Customer Gathering Associate” and £199.75 as an "Independent Distributor" (Telecom Plus site, Q&A page), to belong to the club (which no distributor has mentioned in the blogs). The distributors do mention the £10 credit that after one year is given for every service you use other and above the first one if you stay a year. So after one year with, say, 4 services, one gets approx £9 better off in this respect. (pricefighter, moneysavingexpert, 09-05-2006, 3:23 PM)
 * Prices:

“Despite huge falls in the cost to companies of buying both gas and electricity over the last year, Telecom Plus, which provides gas and electricity under the Utility Warehouse brand, increased its electricity prices in some regions by up to 7 per cent on Tuesday. The move went unnoticed because the previous day, the last of the 'big six' energy companies, Scottish Power and EDF Energy, had announced their long-awaited price cuts, which are to take effect on 15 June. 'While EDF Energy and, previously, npower have come in for much justified criticism for not cutting their electricity prices for their most loyal electricity customers, Telecom Plus has cynically taken advantage of the confusion over prices to actually increase its electricity prices for certain customers,' says Joe Malinowski of price comparison website Theenergyshop.com.

'Overall we have reduced gas and electricity prices significantly across the country, but there are one or two regional exceptions to this where we hadn't put our prices up as much as others did previously,' says Charles Wigoder, chief executive of Telecom Plus.”

“Criticisms have been raised against various MLM (Multi Level Marketing) programs for being cult-like in nature. Some MLM programs feature intense motivational programs, which can be hard to distinguish from cult propaganda. So-called corporate cults are businesses whose techniques to gain associate commitment and loyalty are in some ways similar to those used by traditional cults. Amway associates are sometimes cited as an example of such devotion.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Marketing)

There is no denying that Utility Warehouse does not have the best customer service in the industry. The time and energy that you are likely to waste because of this wll far outweigh any money that you might save. (Voyager2002, moneysavingexpert, 09-05-2006, 10:54 AM).
 * Services:

Telecom Plus, as an extra intermediary between actual producers and customers, considerably reduces its own running costs and overheads by using call centers. That mechanisation of customer servicing is inherently split between two competing logics, the need to be cost-efficient competing with the need to deliver customer satisfaction - springing from a managerial attempts at fulfilling the simultaneous priorities of quality and quantity.

One of the reasons why Moneysupermarket has not listed Utility Warehouse is because of UW's management structure. Although it is not properly speaking “pyramid-selling”, where income is generated by actually signing on people, Jason Lloyd from Moneysupermarket points out that in the system adopted by UW the “people at the top of the chain of 3,000+ agents receive commission payments for sales from their agents and so on and so on.”
 * "Economical proselytism":

Moneysupermarket also reproaches UW its lack of accountability, as the company has no physical offices in the UK, with the majority of the directors of the company based abroad albeit still earning very large sums from the 3,000 agents who work for them.
 * Lack of accountability and of ethical garantees:

Energy (gas + electricity)
Their Energy is now supplied by N-Power they just bill you and act as N-Powers agent. They have made 2 price increases in last two month. their site (at www.utilitywarehouse.co.uk) can help working out what savings on energy you might make if any. It is understood that their site is up to date as far as their prices are concerned. (pricefighter, moneysavingexpert, 09-05-2006, 3:23 PM)
 * prices:

was billed for 2 addresses, paid 2 months of it before spotting it, waited 3 months for reimbursement while charges “for non-paiement” kept being added, meters outside (= accessible) not checked in 5 months so bills get inflated from estimates, gets debt collection letters when it's the company owing money. (margypoos, Moneysavingexpert, 20-04-2006, 10:30 PM)
 * Customer service:

Phone / broadband
“Some guy convinced my parents to sign up for 4 services including Broadcall [...] it is one of the WORST internet providers i've ever been on.” (Intellix, moneysupermarket, Fri, Dec 14 2007, 9:10 PM)

“can't leave because im on broadcall and am tied into a contract length.” (Intellix, moneysupermarket, Mon, May 19 2008, 2:54 PM)
 * tying up to long-term contracts:

“when my phone was with them my Bills were often wrong as if they couldn't cope with the complexity. And to boot i now have a debt with them for the excess that billing and or customer service failed in their execution of recent payment budget plan Bill.” [http://www.moneysupermarket.com/community/forums/t/utility-warehouse-telecom-plus-gasampelectric-are-4724.aspx Moneysupermarket forum thread - utility warehouse telecom plus gas&electric are no longer cheapest] (post on Mon, Apr 23 2007, 2:51 PM)
 * Bad management of billing

calls it “INutility Warehouse”. Two months with it for telecom products, saved nothing, actually lost more than 34£; called to ask if he could switch back to his old provider, is told he must pay a “penalty” [sic] of £242.00. (Calin in Moneysavingexpert, 20-04-2006, 9:13 PM)
 * Prices:

Their Internet technical support (= customer service) has an 0900 number (Calin in Moneysavingexpert, 20-04-2006, 9:13 PM) or an 0871 phone number at a cost of 5p a minute - even though one is already paying the phone company on budget for free calls 7 days a week. So they make money off you to phone too. (Moneysupermarket forum thread - utility warehouse telecom plus gas&electric are no longer cheapest - post on Mon, Apr 23 2007, 2:51 PM)

BT line rental is only normally £11 a month including caller display. Utility Warehouse will charge you for caller display and other calling features. (pricefighter, moneysavingexpert, 09-05-2006, 3:23 PM)

UWDC 512 kb bb, and unlimited calls offer of approx £20 a month (first 6 months) then approx £23 for next 6 months does not include line rental. This will be £10 a month extra on top of this plus you would have to pay £1.50p a month for caller display. [You might do better on the Phone front if you had a look at Martin MSE advice see: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi...95003038,99872] (pricefighter, moneysavingexpert, 09-05-2006, 3:23 PM)

Don't believe that Utility Warehouse are any cheaper than any other ISP as there is far better out there. They say the bandwidth limit is 30gb which seems fair but this includes download/upload during peak AND offpeak times whereas other ISPs bandwidth limit is DOWNLOAD used in peak times only. This has caused us to get charged around £5-£10 extra a month on additional bandwidth costs that they claimed were the same as our old ISP. (Intellix, moneysupermarket, Mon, May 19 2008, 2:54 PM)

paying for the 40gb limit one which includes (downloads, uploads 24:7) Whereas other ISPs tend to give you 40gb download only during peak hours and unlimited during the night. Went a bit over and getting charged an extra 12.50 for an additional 10gb download package (= “getting charged for something we wont even use.”) (Intellix in moneysupermarket, Fri, Dec 14 2007, 9:10 PM)
 * Limited download capacity:

Used to get around 6-7mbps download speeds and 0.4mbps upload at any time of the day, [after the switch] he gets around 0.5mbps-2mbps download dependent on time of day with upload speeds of around 0.1mbps-0.3mbps. (Intellix in moneysupermarket, Fri, Dec 14 2007, 9:10 PM)
 * Internet speed:

“Ping times, absolutely terrible”... playing a FPS game on PC or XBOX360, and gets spikes of pings of around 200-2000ms.(Intellix in moneysupermarket, Fri, Dec 14 2007, 9:10 PM)
 * Pings:

many times has the internet gone completely down for about an hour. (obviously not an exchange problem as all friends in the area have fine internet) (Intellix in moneysupermarket, Fri, Dec 14 2007, 9:10 PM)
 * Full loss of line:

you're charged 5p a month and left waiting around 15 minutes until someone can get through to you (any time of day, obviously to squeeze a bit of cash from you) whereas my old ISP had an average wait of about 1-2 minutes. Then we get through to ask about the speed problems and are told something entirely wrong to try and keep me happy. (Intellix in moneysupermarket, Fri, Dec 14 2007, 9:10 PM)
 * Customer service:

“internet problems i've had... I've spoken to Utility Warehouse and the first response I got was a phone call with someone trying to confuse me with aload of terms that I am already familiar with. It's called lag sir! there's nothing we can do... have you even looked into the problem? Then they ring me up claiming they've found the reason why i'm getting huge pings and lag in online game servers, 'cause I was playing on a foreign server... they pick one of the furthest away servers and place all the blame on that as though its the only place that has been played at, yet UK servers are still bad. Then when my ping becomes stable from around 1500ms average, they say that the broadband is working and even though speedtests return extremely poor results. There's nothing they can do as it's obvious that its' working and then [they] force me to close the case. Did a few more speedtests and shown them the results but they just ignored and didn't bother emailing back. So I get around 7mbps on a speedtest before changing ISP, switch to Utility Warehouse and get about 0.5mbps-2mbps and the broadband is working as pings are good? (Intellix, moneysupermarket, Mon, May 19 2008, 2:54 PM)

The operators are rude. (Calin in Moneysavingexpert, 20-04-2006, 9:13 PM)

Utility Warehouse is not itself involved in nuclear power. (http://dnn.ethicalconsumer.org/FreeBuyersGuides/energyutilities/gassuppliers.aspx) That does not say about what its providers are doing.
 * Good point?

Utility Warehouse would have paid a commission to appear on Moneysupermarket.com, but Moneysupermarket did not list them because of UW's management structure, and because their utility products are not Energywatch accredited.

Basicdesign (talk) 05:17, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

General discussion
...about the above material.

Make sure you have reliable secondary/tertiary sources to support widespread or well-known problems, not just specific people complaining or other collections of anecdotes. If the business really does have fundamental flaws, it should be easy to find such info. But otherwise, WP is not a soapbox, blog, collection of testimonials, or better business bureau complaint department. DMacks (talk) 14:37, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

multi level marketing ?
List_of_multi-level_marketing_companies suggests that this company uses MLM, but the article does not say so. Any reliable source saying so ? Thanks! Nicolas1981 (talk) 10:50, 27 January 2009 (UTC)


 * its MLM! Rgds, --Trident13 (talk) 12:47, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

Poor broadband terms of service
As of 28th August 2012, the terms of service listed at the utilities warehouse website contains the following clauses under section 5 (Internet Service):

e) [...]. Our Internet Services are designed for normal household usage; use of them for ‘peer to peer’ or any business purpose (other than incidental business use) is prohibited. We reserve the right to restrict capacity, reduce speed or withdraw service from you where we have reasonable cause to believe the Internet Service is being used for any such prohibited purpose, or in any other way which may adversely affect the performance of the Internet Service for other users, at our sole discretion.

g) [...] will be entitled [...] to edit or delete any information, software or such other content which you or anyone using your Internet Service may place online at any time at our sole discretion.

Having discussed these two clauses with customer services, Utility Warehouse indicate that they do not consider Skype a "peer to peer" service. Despite the lack of a custom definition provided in the T&Cs, they reject that the phrase refers to peer to peer technologies, and have hap-hazardly indicated they are referring to illegal usage, which is actually handled elsewhere in the document. For all intents and purposes, using Skype is in breach of these T&Cs, and yet an accepted activity on their network.

The Utility Warehouse representative had no opinion of clause g, but it is terribly written.

212.183.128.88 (talk) 16:00, 28 August 2012 (UTC)