Plusnet poor quality of service, connection and more

Well plusnets quality of service seems to be in deterioration.

While this may not be as bad as some of you I have noticed more dropped connections. I know this because I monitor and keep track of my ip's.

I called PN other day and they claimed it was BT maintenance but they keep on saying that like it's some excuse. BT openreach seem so haphazard if that is the case.

Anyway it happened again last night, dropped around 2am and a new IP this morning. I have used the zen checker and their was no maintenance last night but there will be tonight.

So that will be another dropped connection.

http://status.zen.co.uk/broadband/

On top of that the call centre waiting times have gone up again. Called other night about 1am and it was a 30 minute wait.

When I asked about the Leeds call centre and said it was meant to reduce waiting times, PN said, the Leeds call centre shuts at 5pm. PN said they don't have a lot of staff on after this. Never used to be like that

Well that's a lot of flaming good with the Leeds call centre being shut at 5pm. What is the point of a new call centre if it's closed at 5pm.

plusnet need to pull themselves together and stop proving such a poor service. There fibre is also going down the pan.

That�s what you get when you try and sell flaming broadband at £2.99. It's not sustainable.

I may as well go back to BT in future for my fibre. Sort it PN!




* Note* Trolls need not reply to me, you know who you are. Thank You.

Edited by deleted (Sun 27-Jul-14 13:21:25)

The call centre should be open 24/7 as both Sheffield & Leeds sharing call centres. If Leeds closed at 5pm, it revert to Sheffield call centre. But, I agree with you, why Leeds closed at 5pm? It's seem waste of money and pointless to expanding new call centre in Leeds. Also, Plusnet are suppose to expanding it with new jobs too, Seem likely no ones seem bother now. The phone call on the support is going from bad to worse now. But, I don't bother use the phone call. I use plusnet community forum instead as there seem lots quicker than waiting on the phone for hours!

Edited by adslmax (Sun 27-Jul-14 14:09:46)

Only getting decent support from a forum is no good if your broadband is down, and what keeps many from Talktalk.

Seems to me you're paying exactly what you should be paying, for no phone support. Enjoy!

I recently moved from Plusnet Fibre to Sky Fibre and although the move was initially financial as I got offered a great deal with Sky, it was really just in the nick of time.

18 months ago when I joined Plusnet you could ring up and be through within 2 or 3 minutes at most. Dealing with a line fault in the last couple of months of being with them it was always a minimum of 30 minutes to get through, despite it usually saying 15 minutes when the call was initially auto-answered. On one occasion I waited 25 minutes and then got put through to another department , for which I waited a further 35 minutes. I don't care how much they announce the delay, these waiting times are unacceptable and simply demonstrate them being under-manned.

When I did eventually switch, my connection, which had been 29 down for most of the service, but 25 for the last 8 weeks or so, jumped up to 36! I presumed that would be a starting point and it would fall back, but after almost 3 months its still up there. Any fears about the Sky Hub have been groundless so far as well, so I'm well pleased with the move.

I called them again shortly after posting this and it was a 40 minute wait.

Plusnet at the start of this year harped on about how call wait times would improve with the opening of the Leeds call center but seems it was just hot air. Either that or are they having an exodus of staff leave.


Maybe plusnet should stop wasting money on stupid advertising campaigns and put the money into improving customer focused service first.

Plusnet don't seem to understand that, customers who have bad service, are more likely to tell others and Plusnet less likely to gain more customers.


Broadband could do with improvements as I see others complaining about dropping connections and poor broadband.

Edited by deleted (Sun 27-Jul-14 18:34:30)

Any fears about the Sky Hub have been groundless so far as well, so I'm well pleased with the move.

A lot of people seem to believe it's going to be a poor piece of kit. Yes, Skys router does not have flash and crazy features on paper. That said, when Sky first released their broadband they provided a Netgear router and it had so many issues. Sky learnt from that mistake quite significantly and every single router since has been totally reliable. Generally a Sky provided router doesn't crash, lock up or need rebooting. Out of Virginmedia, BT and Sky - the only routers I've never had to reboot occasionally has been my Sky routers. The Superhub on Virgin always locked up and the BT Hub often reboots itself (I've had several now). I had over 20 devices connecting to my Sky hub and an uptime over 3 months in the past.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Yes, Skys router does not have flash and crazy features on paper.

It also has some big missing features for a 40 or 80 meg "fibre" service in 2014. Including 5GHz support and multiple streams for N on either frequency. Its the lowest spec of the big 4 ISPs and they really need an updated one.

Sky rarely push customers onto the 76Mbps fibre offering. Their deals always focus around the 40Mbps product. The sky hub can handle the 40 Mbps product without the fancy features.

If you have used 5Ghz you will realise the range is pretty poor and often 2.4 ends up faster.

For the 80Mbps (76 advertised) speed the sky hub caps out around 60Mbps for me so it's not good enough you're right.

That said the homehub dual band on 5Ghz is worse speed wise through just 2 walls in my house than 2.4 Ghz

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sun 27-Jul-14 23:17:29)

I wouldn't really think because a pppoa tunnel drops and reconnects causing an Ip change on a cheap home connection is in any way abnormal?

I would have thought that was just the nature of the low cost service and the pppoa authentication methods used by the industry.

I can't imagine any other isp using BT openreach/wholesale and including BT will be any different?

That's just what you get with a basic home service. If you want fixed IP's and better service level guarantees you will need a leased line product really or at least a business package. Not a home product.

I'm not on a cheap service, especially not a PN £2.99 broadband that would not be much use.

I am on PN fibre which uses PPPOE not PPPOA. I'm sure others who use the PPPOA Protocol have the same problem. It seems to be a common problem with a plusnet broadband connection.

I don't require a static IP either. I keep a check on the dynamic IP's I am allocated and that is also, what alerts me to a dropped connection, as well as it happening in the middle of a download.

Edited by deleted (Mon 28-Jul-14 01:52:42)

In reply to a post by superspeed:

I'm not on a cheap service, especially not a PN £2.99 broadband that would not be much use.

Well you are when you talk as if you want 24/7 up time. Take a look how much leased lines cost - or even business level xDSL services. All residential customers are getting 'a cheap service'. The UK has some of the cheapest consumer internet connectivity in the world

It's also worth bearing in mind that most connection issues lie within BT's remit. DNS problems are going to be PN but failed PPP connections and line drops are more likely to be BT and as such will impact all ISPs equally.

I do agree that PN need to up their game in call-centre wait times and support responses. Apparently if you post to their forums you get a faster response. I haven't needed to talk to them very often though.

Edited by Andrue (Mon 28-Jul-14 10:02:44)

In reply to a post by superspeed:

Maybe plusnet should stop wasting money on stupid advertising campaigns and put the money into improving customer focused service first.

Quite!

Over 75% of voters on a community poll agree with you: http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,1221...

...Just to say that I'm with PN on ADSL2+ and my connection has been up for 65 days -so not a normal occurrence to drop!

Any company or business should know that there is only one metric to sustain growth and profits and that is Customer Satisfaction - meeting, or exceeding, Customer Requirements and providing excellent Customer Service.
Customer Service comes at a cost to the bottom line.
A dissatisfied customer will express his/her dissatisfaction to 20 people, (or as many who will listen), whereas a satisfied customer will only enthuse to about 5 others.
It costs ten times more to recruit a new customer than to retain an existing customer.

It is an accountant's juggling game.

Be got it wrong. Their cost of Customer Service meant they could not invest in Infrastructure improvements. Talk Talk are realising the error of their ways and improving their Customer Support. Plusnet, at the moment, due to their massive marketing costs, cannot provide the requisite Customer Service to their escalating customer base.

Sky, in my opinion, have got it just about right, albeit probably due to funding from other parts of their operation, to match funding for infrastructure improvement and Customer Service costs with profitability.

Just my thoughts .................

Brilliant. Thanks .

Hi superseed,

I can confirm that there have been a number of drops in connection over the recent months and this has been down to a mixture of supplier issues as well as maintenance on our side.

The maintenance aspect has been by way of gateway upgrades which have been done one at a time, given this, there would be scope for a single customer to be subject to multiple drops if they happen to shift along the gateways as we have upgraded them.

With regards to the call wait times and opening hours for the Leeds call centre, we're aware of the increase in the time it takes to get through over the last couple of months and we're working to scale up the Leeds site as quickly as we can in order to combat this.

This time round we're ensuring that the staffing is done right so we have increased the training times which doesn't help us get staffed as quick as we could be it should mean that we're able to provide a better level of support once we hit the peak level. We apologise for the inconvenience this may cause but please bear with us, we're working on getting this problem resolved.

As for the opening times, I'm sorry that you were misinformed here as the Leeds call centre is open from 8am to 9pm in order to cover the busiest parts of the day. This then falls back to the Sheffield centre after this point where it continues through the night.

Thanks,

Adam can you get one of the existing reps to email [email protected] to confirm your status as PlusNet staff and we can get the flag added to the account.

Thanks for reply Adam but please don't take too long as call center waiting times have been a problem for some time.

Only last Christmas the call wait time was not far short of an hour. It came down a bit then back up to 30+ minutes where we are now.

When I phone at 1am in the morning, you should not really be on hold for over 30 minutes at that time. You need to get more staff on. If everything went down then I can understand it.

The only reason I really have had cause to call, is because of the dropped connections.
I have not had a good experience with your ticket systems as some have taken a month to reply on other matters in the past.

I prefer to speak to someone anyway as you can say so much more.