It occurred to me today that I couldn’t remember the last time I had received a bill from, nor indeed how I was paying for my original dial up Demon Internet service.

Back in 1993 I signed up for their then pretty revolutionary ‘tenner a month’ dial up IP service.  The legendary events surrounding the birth of Demon Internet are told in detail here.

In those days I was using an Amiga 1200, a US Robotics Modem and browsing the then limited Internet with NCSA Mosaic.

Demon was very successful and quickly established itself as the UK’s largest ISP.  In 1998 it’s founder Cliff Stanford sold the company to Scottish Telecom, a subsidiary of Scottish Power.  Scottish Telecom was subsequently rebranded as Thus and floated on the stock exchange.  More recently (2008) Thus was bought by Cable and Wireless and is now branded as Thus, A Cable and Wireless Business.

During all these changes over the past 17 years I have also moved house twice, had numerous different computers, and of course no longer use the dial up service although I’ve never cancelled the account due to the amount of services where I use the associated e-mail for log in and partly through absent mindedness.

A quick scan of my bank accounts and there of course was the direct debit, now £19.99/month the reason I hadn’t noticed it, apart from being a dufus was I also have a Demon Broadband account for work and simply hadn’t noticed there were two debits going out each month.  So I headed over to http://www.demon.net to see if I could log into my account and see what details were lurking there.

However I was unable to find anywhere to log in so I called the customer services number.  Armed with, well nothing really apart from my user name I spoke to a very helpful chap.  It transpired that the address they had on record for me was the original address I had given in 1993 and hadn’t lived at for 12 years and the phone number was similarly out of date.

After updating my records the chap advised me to call another department as he believed as a long standing customer I should be paying less for my service and he was right.  I’m now paying £4.99/month as a loyal customer as opposed to the £19.99 I was paying, quite a saving.  I was also able to retrieve my account number and set up my ebilling account and view some invoices, unfortunately they only go back around 12 months.

I now wanted to discover when the price increased to £19.99/month.  I noticed on the bills that I could now access that the description of the product supplied was SDU/Premier Connect PLUS (UPGRADE.)  So I entered this into Google and found the following page.

Which contained the following information:-

If you are an existing SDU customer, you will need to register in order to take advantage of Demon Premier Connect Plus. In future you will be billed £19.99 instead of the £11.75 that you currently pay for your SDU account.

I do not remember asking to be upgraded to this service so I feel another call to customer services is due.

And then there’s my Pipex Dial account…