I would really appreciate it if fellow ozbargainers could lend me some guidance as to what I should do.
9 months ago I joined DeVoteD NBN, with the plan 25/5 for $55.00 + compulsory $8.95 UNI-V, for a total of $63.95 a month. It was a 24 month contract and I thought that the price was pretty good. There are some cons with this provider however, as they will limit your download during peak hour, and will bottleneck your network if you attempt to download heaps of stuff during this busy period. Furthermore, the service isn't very stable, with occasional hiccups and sometimes slow speed during peak hour. Given the price however, I was still relatively satisfied.
However, 4 months later, DeVoteD was acquired by NuSkope. Things were still the same until today, when I got a letter that reads:
"We want to keep you informed about an important change to your current NuSkope account/plan. From the 6th of January 2017, we will be increasing our monthly charge to match the national standard to ensure that we continue to be competitive in the current market.
Your current plan Devoted NBN 25Mbit/5Mbit Unlimited $55.00 will change to NuSkope NBN 25Mbit/5Mbit Unlimited $79.95"
That's almost a 50% increase!
Is this even allowed? I mean, I thought we agreed to a 24 month contract.
What would you do in this situation? I will give them a call sometime this week, but I would like to consider my options first and have a well informed knowledge of my rights to this issue.
Thanks in advance!
They are changing the terms of the contract. You will be allowed to break out of the contract without paying any penalty fees.
Not siding with them or anything but my understanding is that Devoted was a cheap-as-chips provider which had fairly high contention ratios and their business model involved subscribing a lot of people on Unlimited plans, without really having the capacity to provide for all of them during peak hours. As a Devoted customer myself on 25/5 plan, much of the time the max speeds were half of that at peak hours meaning I wasn't really getting what I paid for anyways.
Ever since NuSkope bought out Devoted they have changed to a 'quality over quantity' business model and are no longer offering any unlimited plans to new customers — only the old DeVoted customers will get unlimited. They've also upgraded their infrastructure as well so I'm no longer seeing the horrible speeds prior to the company acquisition.
As it stands though the pricing of the Unlimited plans have been jacked up because it's the Unlimited users who use most of the bandwidth and are getting a 'cheap ride'.