- Up to 8Mb speed upgrades! (subject to availability).
- Addition of PlusTalk minutes on our broadband phone (VoIP) service.
- New usage allowances and traffic management.

There’s no upgrade fee or change to subscription and you will not be asked to begin a new 12 month contract. You don’t even need to change any settings – we’re doing everything for you!

Your product will be upgraded on your first billing date after 30th March 2006. If you pay annually this will be the same day in the month as your annual subscription, e.g. the 15th. Speed upgrades will follow over the coming months - see below.

Customers on other products will be upgraded separately and we'll be contacting you by email if this applies to you.

High-speed broadband is here and if you’ve got broadband you’ll be getting upgraded for free!

It will take BT several months to upgrade the thousands of PlusNet broadband customers, so priority will be given to customers on the up to 4Mb and 8Mb products. We’ll then ask BT to upgrade our customers in the order they joined PlusNet, as recognition for loyalty.

We’ll contact you by email when BT perform your upgrade. And remember: 'up to 8Mb' really does mean 'up to'. Many factors affect broadband speed, including line quality, distance to the BT exchange and the weather. BT's 8Mb trials showed an average speed of 6.1Mb - a huge speed increase!

It’s important to remember that a small percentage of customers will be unable to get a speed upgrade because their line cannot support it. You will be contacted by email if this happens to you.

If you have been paying for an up to 4Mb or 8Mb broadband service and are unable to get these speeds we will refund you, providing you haven’t exceeded your usage allowances.

Traffic management can sometimes sound like a bad thing for customers, but it’s the opposite: it’s the best way to guarantee everybody gets the best service possible for their money, especially as faster speeds allow higher usage.

Our network will cleverly prioritise traffic based on type of usage, e.g. browsing, online gaming, streaming media or peer-to-peer. Because some types of usage are more time sensitive than others, they will get priority, e.g. browsing and online gaming. This means you get the level of service that’s appropriate to your needs.

Our network will also be able to manage the small percentage of customers who use their service unsustainably, to stop this from affecting the majority of our customers.

Other ISPs are starting to follow this approach, but as industry leaders we are in a better position to guarantee quality broadband to our customers.

Key changes:
- Peak-time hours defined as 4pm – midnight.
- New peak-time usage allowances for some products (see above).
- Improved View My Broadband Usage tool.

You’ll also have access to an improved version of the popular VMBU tool when we upgrade your product. It’ll let you monitor every aspect of your usage:

- Simple summary of your usage each month.
- Detailed breakdown of type-by-type usage, such as browsing, gaming, and peer-to-peer.
- Full record of peak-time and off-peak usage amounts.
- Management level notices to let you know if you use more than your peak-time usage allowance.

Sun, sea, sand and elephants! Fancy a holiday with a difference?

Sleep with the fishes at the incredible Underwater Hotel, hot air balloon into an African sunset, loaf on picture-postcard Caribbean beaches or discover the family-fun of the “Sunshine State”.

...win the trip of a lifetime by recommending PlusNet’s great service.

Holiday choices:
1. Kenyan safari and beach holiday
2. Florida family holiday
3. Barbados beach holiday – all-inclusive
4. The Underwater Hotel and Florida Keys

Simply recommend us to a friend and we’ll enter you into the competition when they join.

Find out more about the fantastic holidays on offer and how to make a recommendation.

Binary Usenet is used by a small minority of mainly technically savvy customers to download large files. Because very few customers have been using our Binary Usenet service it will no longer be available from 3rd April 2006 onwards.

We will continue to offer an excellent text-only Usenet service and customers can of course continue to use third party binary Usenet feeds and providers.

You can find more information in our dedicated forum posting.

In your feedback from the last newsletter, you told us you wanted to know more about the direction and issues facing the broadband industry. So we’ve produced PlusNet’s Outlook for 2006.

It’s a great insight into what can be expected over the coming months and years, from the broadband industry and from PlusNet.

It discusses such issues as, the growing interest in broadband film and TV, the bundling of VoIP services and changes in usage behaviour.

Congratulations to Mr. Clare of Ceredigion, the winner of last month’s newsletter competition, who said:

"I’d like faster Internet because…"
"...it adds a big Plus to the Net!"

Mr. Clare has won £250 of luxury hotel vouchers.

Thank you to everyone who entered. We had some great replies:

"...The Internet would become the insta-net!"
"...Life is too short to lag behind the competition."
"...It makes the Internet even more fun."

Have you seen your chance to win a dream holiday by recommending PlusNet?