Plusnet: I give up!!

I'm a long standing customer of Plusnet's but I have now come to the end of my tether with them. As an IT consultant too who not only relies on Plusnets services to deliver my business but I have personally reccommended Plusnet as an ISP of worth and yet I am now embarrased by the association and completely let down as a customer.

My problema like a lot of others started with the upgrade back in May that I didn't ask for, my up & down speeds increased significantly and what was a stable service became an intermittent service.

After no mean feat of getting on a a 'ticket' or 'question' (or whatever they were calling them then I finally got them to drop the service speed and give me a usable service, however this usable speed has been complete with 15-20 outages a day.

I have since tried to open more tickets/questions to resolve this and due to their new improved processes all i achieve is kicking off a Broadband checker and having them close the ticket. On four seperate occasions they have done this.

Can I call them? No
Can I email them? No
Can I raise another ticket? Yes but only to repeat a loop that has failed me several times already.

So now I want to leave and reading some of the threads on this site it seems I wouldn't be able to do that either.

All I get from Plusnet is warm words from Directors and Service Managers in newsletters from people who are anonymous to me as I wouldn't be able to contact them if I tried.

Now I don't know where the problem lies but I know Plusnet are at the root of it for no other reason than despite this mess they have without fail managed to collect a fee from me for my 'service'.

I know this is a rant but if anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them....

Many thanks.

Unfortunately you don't give too many details about the stats for your line, or whether you are IPStream Max or LLU. Since you got higher speeds in May, I assume you are on IPStrean Max?

I think some options are:
- If you are in fast mode, request that interleaving is enabled
- Try resyncing or rebooting at the time of day with the worst SNR margin
- If your equipment allows you to set the maximum down sync rate (e.g. SAR 110/130), then set a lower rate to push up the SNR margin
- Request to be put back on the original 2Mb/s scheme, as some others have done

It may be worth sending a PM to one of the comms staff through the PN portal, just to bring their attention to the matter...

Do you know if you are on MaxDSL or LLU? (your upstream may give us a hint) LLU currently has problems with disconnections which Tiscali and NTL are in the process of nailing down - though it is taking them ages.
If you are on MaxDSL and want to leave, you might end up with the same conection - migrations are normally a computer exercise not a physical cabling one.

If you want to leave, the best thing to do is raise a question/ticket asking for your MAC code. As you say you are a long standing customer I assume you paid your activation when you joined. Unless you moved recently and have a deferred move fee then you shouldn't owe anymore than the subs as they become due. Your 30 days notice period will start from when you ask for your MAC as well, so if it takes 2-3 days to get to you, you are still 2-3 days into your notice period (unlike most ISPs who appear to start the notice period from when they can be bothered to issue the MAC).

Thanks dusty_bin:

I'll accept details are sketchy and its no wonder as I don't really have answers to your questions!

These speeds are from my router:

DownStream Connection Speed 1732 kbps
UpStream Connection Speed 297 kbps

I didn't requestt any upgrade, they upgraded me, prior to this I was on a 1 meg down and .5 meg up though technically this was a 2 meg service but the line limits prevented more.

If you have any pointers to how I answer the rest of your questions I'm all ears (until the next outage anyway!).

That sounds like it could be MaxDSL to me, but I thought all the old fixed rate products had 256K upload not 512K.

As Dusty_bin suggested it might be worth asking one of the reps in the Plusnet forum (or on the usergroup forum) to intervene. It looks like your line could be long and not really suitable for MaxDSL.
If you migrate you need to make sure the ISP you migrate to will put you on a fixed speed product and not MaxDSL though otherwise you would be back where you started, but with a different ISP.

You could be right on the original upload speed it is a long distant memory, blurred by frustration.

I'll wait and see if a Plusnet representative comes along that I can hitch a ride with. I remember some while ago getting helped out by Ian Wild through here, no idea whether he is still knocking around these parts but he was a proper chap who got me sorted with little hassles.

Thanks again.

The reps have officially left here now - I won't go into the whys etc as this has been done to death recently.
I will see if I can find a rep on some of the other forums and point him in your direction though. If you could reply with a question/ticket number from your account or your username it will help them (assuming I find someone online)

What equipment are you using to connect?
If you look here, it explains how to get the other information. Kitz explains some of the key information here.
I suppose the useful information is to know what sort of SNR is achieved at the sync rates you are connecting at, whether either or both vary during the day, how much they vary and whether the problems typically occur at random or at similar times of the day.

One thing I forgot, was to make sure you had actually checked your system while directly connected to the test connector at the master socket, just to get a reference without anything else connected. There are some basic fault finding guides on Kitz's site and on the PN (or maybe usertools) site, but I don't recall them off the top of my head...
If you have trouble finding them, I could probably track them down...

Thanks again,

take your pick from these:

ID: 20264964 Closed Your comment 9:40pm, Monday 11th September 2006
ID: 20181940 Closed Your comment 9:17am, Thursday 31st August 2006
ID: 20181939 Closed Your comment 9:17am, Thursday 31st August 2006
ID: 19407519 Closed Your comment 9:51am, Thursday 18th May 2006
ID: 19407472 Closed Your comment 9:42am, Thursday 18th May 2006
ID: 19407470 Closed Your comment 9:42am, Thursday 18th May 2006

Username: hobdell

And don't forget that if you had downtime, you can ask for compensation.