In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

As a sideline Plusnet's order support was horrendous. The last person spoken to was a robot who kept talking over the account holder and interrupting her to recite the same information over and over again.

You're not alone. That was an experience I had recently with the support team - on three separate occasions.

The problem today is there is too much talking and not enough listening!

A result of mobile phones?

No idea.

Recommendation on the Plusnet forum is to plug directly into the test socket, presumably on the off chance that the passive face plate went bad at exactly the same time as a guy in the exchange was rejumpering the line.

I think it's fair to say it's not the face plate.

is there not a small chance the HR fault is actually in the faceplate, hence the suggestion to rule it out?

Sounds like you had a relatively smooth transition compared to the "Right Pig's Ear" we experienced!

We migrated from a superb TalkTalk LLU ADSL2+ line to Plus net, for its FTTC service. There were ongoing problems from the outset, mostly related to the ordering process.

So far, the transfer has taken five weeks, and still no sign of fibre broadband. Still waiting for an engineer's appointment to connect us at the fibre cabinet. Apparently no appointments are available for another three weeks, at the earliest.

Our cherished phone number of ten years has been lost in the transfer process, although it was originally promised by Plus Net that we would keep it.

We've been billed £50 for a "new line" when we were told the transfer would be free. Plus Net made the flaky promise that the £50 would be refunded after we had transferred. A promise which no one seems to have recorded.

We specifically asked for an afternoon booking from an Openreach engineer ( to "trace the pair"), only for it to be booked for the morning. That had to be cancelled and a new afternoon appointment made. Nevertheless, the engineer arrived in the morning! It was a Quinns contractor who'd travelled 50 miles and wanted to get his jobs finished by lunchtime.

Instead of migrating us directly to Plus Net FTTC, we were told we would be migrated first to Plus Net ADSL "so that we can get you on our system". We were promised a seamless transfer of broadband provision. But in the event, broadband was down for eight days. Thank God for 3G.

So far Plus Net ADSL has been very poor, and the much vaunted support has been substandard, too. We were getting 17Mbps with TalkTalk. That's now been slashed to just 7Mbps with Plus net. No one from plus net seem to know how to resolve that and provide us with a similar bandwidth that we got with TalkTalk. For reasons unknown, upstream is routinely capped by Plus net, too.

After two hours waiting in phone queues to report the broadband fault ("we are currently experiencing high call volumes") we were fobbed off with the claim that "7Mbps is all that your line can support!"

We are being billed for Caller Display, but that wasn't provisioned properly by Plus net either ("it's recorded in our front office system, but for some reason the order didn't pass to back office")

And when it finally came to upgrading to Plus Net FTTC from ADSL, the half price deal for 6 months had finished!

We requested Plus Net to honour that half price deal (since they delayed the provision by migrating us first to ADSL). But they would agreed only if we took out a 24 month contract rather than the standard 18 months.

Checking the support tickets, it seems the next problem is that Plus net has requested a 40/10 service, rather than 80/20.

To be honest, not impressed. With the benefit of hindsight, we would definitely have stayed with TalkTalk.

Edited by deleted (Thu 25-Jul-13 13:57:35)

On the ADSL speeds, what are the stats from the router, i.e. actual connection speed, attenuation and noise margin. They are the real indicator of what a line can do rather than the guess-estimate system

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

is there not a small chance the HR fault is actually in the faceplate, hence the suggestion to rule it out?

Very small given the face plate worked perfectly for 8 months and if it is the issue simultaneously went faulty at the same exact time as the line was moved from Sky MPF to BT Wholesale.

The voice service was down for over 9 hours, it seems reasonable to think that there were some issues with the provisioning.

Probability heads in that direction but have learnt over the years coincidence is a real devil

I prefer Occam's Razor and experience has shown it to be far more reliable. It would seem a bizarre way of troubleshooting indeed to eliminate the virtually impossible while leaving by far the most likely course of events untested.

can I ask why the change to plusnet?

I was going to say typical HR fault, but given what you said we have to look at whats changed which is going to be the line card.