Recommend PlusNet fibre?

I am currently on Sky ADSL 20mb which I joined after they bought out O2 and offered me a great freebies deal.
My contract is up soon and don't intend to renew the Sky Tv stuff as I hardly watch any of it.
I was thinking of switching to Plusnet Fibre cos it seems well priced (and the TV adverts imply great customer service) but doing some googling I see horrendous reviews on TrustPilot and othe plusnet hate sites.
Now, I know people usually only leave negative feedback but it seems like a horror story on the support side - upto 45 mins on hold etc and muppet support staff.

Should I bother or should I pay more and just go with BT or even stick with Sky??

Plusnet are generally fine apart from a recent issue with telephone support waiting times(current stats here).

The phone wait times can be bad but the support staff are not muppets. But how often will you need phone support? Hopefully once in a blue moon. Meanwhile, the support here and on the Plusnet Community forums is excellent, although most staff generally only post during office hours. I would wholeheartedly recommend it.

plus.net very good in my experience... and as already mentioned there online support is very good.

Though if price is of bigger priority Sky may give you a better deal, though I'm not a fan of there's never mind there customer service.

The main thing I would worry about is getting a BT Openreach contractor to do the install instead of the 'real deal'. The guy who installed my fibre connected my phone to an extension instead of the outside line.

Well I don't think openreach are doing many installs at the moment.... last I heard they where short of staff...

I should add that not all the contractors are that bad, and I've had some experiences and can still say that.

Edited by mlmclaren (Tue 10-Jun-14 21:39:21)

The telephone support seems to have generally long support times, despite a second UK-based (as is the first) being UK based. That is a significant drawback for prospective customers such as yourself, but possibly better even so than the apparently useless strictly script-driven BT support from India once you get through.

My decision on whether to move to Plusnet or BT Infinity was in the end decided by the responses received on the phone. BT completely ruled themselves out at that stage.

I have now been a happy PN FTTC customer since Feb 2012, and in Jan 2013 upgraded from the 40Mbps to the 80Mbps product so restarted my 18-month minimum term. Obviously not worried.

The reps who visit here and more so the Community forums are really good. You would need to get escalated several tiers on BT or Sky to get anything approaching the service they provide.

I was with PN for several years on an ADSL line and they were very good with sorting out several problems. Switched to FTTC 2 years ago and have never looked back.

Hey - thanks for all the replies and re-assurance - much appreciated. I was worried after reading so many negatives on various websites and blogs. But you guys are giving me some confidence to go with Plus Net
I guess the service may be similar to my current situation with Vodafone - telephone support is a naff, but I just go and raise a query on their forums directed towards their eTeam and thing usually get resolved reasonably quickly. Still nowhere near the quality and timeliness of O2.

In reply to a post by beardedwonder:

The main thing I would worry about is getting a BT Openreach contractor to do the install instead of the 'real deal'. The guy who installed my fibre connected my phone to an extension instead of the outside line.

Sorry, can you clarify this point - do you mean I should insist/hope for an OpenReach engineer rather a contractor?

Also, If I choose not to go with the Plusnet supplied Wifi router,can you guys recommend one? My slightly complicated home setup ; 3 wired unmanaged switches, reserved IPs for certain devices and Wifi Mac filtering etc. My previous O2 router which I think was a Tecnicolor and appears to have the same web interface as the PlusNet one did not allow me to administer my network properly - ie only showed a few of the attached devices, the switches confused the hell out of it.

In reply to a post by umernalla:

Sorry, can you clarify this point - do you mean I should insist/hope for an OpenReach engineer rather a contractor?

I don't think you can specify this, Plusnet pass the info onto Openreach who then assign and engineer, contractor or not. I ended up without internet for a week waiting for this to be resolved.

Also, If I choose not to go with the Plusnet supplied Wifi router,can you guys recommend one? My slightly complicated home setup ; 3 wired unmanaged switches, reserved IPs for certain devices and Wifi Mac filtering etc. My previous O2 router which I think was a Tecnicolor and appears to have the same web interface as the PlusNet one did not allow me to administer my network properly - ie only showed a few of the attached devices, the switches confused the hell out of it.

I bought a belkin F9K1103 cheap on ebay and loaded some custom firmware on it (padavan). It's pretty good but not as good as a router with openwrt or ddwrt. My setup is main router, 2nd router connected via ethernet running ddwrt with dhcp disabled.

You will need to make sure that any router you replace the Plusnet one with is a PPPoE router so you can put in your Plusnet credentials.