It's possible that between you ordering and your neighbour ordering someone else may have rescheduled or cancelled an engineer appointment freeing that space for a short space of time.

An end-user may be able to move the date in the web panel for the retail ISP but whether that drills down to Openreach is very suspect, i.e. probably what will result is ISP asking for the move and then Openreach shifting it back to the 22nd again.

Or even worse, knowing the "one step at a time" systems they seem to have, the request to move to the 14th at BT Consumer will trigger a cancel of the 22nd. Then the request for the 14th to Openreach will be refused as somebody else will have collared it, and the 22nd slot will have also gone to someone else while that is all going on.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 06-Dec-15 16:31:50)

It sounds like Openreach need to upgrade their systems to some 2015 spec equipment!

Nothing to do with the equipment . It's to do with crisis-management specialists (that's the management speak for panic-mode management, see earlier) not seeing that they need new sales order, local loop job scheduling, and related billing systems.

In reply to a post by TaKeN:

It sounds like Openreach need to upgrade their systems..........

They certainly do need to do that. Whether their current hardware limits having decent software is a possibility but it's more likely the software just doesn't produce a sensibly organised booking system.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

On the face of it, it does look like BT have booked an engineers slot 4 days ahead of Plusnet. However, BT have a history of making errors due to their reliance on the 3rd world.

Hmm, interesting - I don't know about BT Retail failures but Plusnet also have a bad record with cancelled Openreach appointments ...... now what's the common factors here.....Openreach is obviously one of them, but I'm led to believe that Plusnet's and BTr's provisioning systems are similar but how accurate that is I don't know.
I've also noticed on Plusnet's Feedback boards several times a while back that people who went to Sky after having cancelled appointments and then another lengthy wait, seem to have managed to get earlier bookings. This I strongly suspect is down to the Service Level Agreements that Sky and Plusnet have in their contracts with Openreach.

In reply to a post by TaKeN:

Update from the Neighbour, he has had an email through moving his connection date from the 14th to the 22nd of December.

Upon receiving the email he logged into the BT user web panel and moved it back to the 14th again, I hope this doesn't end up a major headache for him!

That was a very silly thing to do IMHO. I'd suggest that he actually speak to his provider to make sure that doesn't get shifted to an even later date as has already been suggested. He could ask if the same date as you is available.
However, I also suggest that you speak to Plusnet soon (chat or phone) to make sure your appointment hasn't been cancelled. There are too many cases where people only find out when there is a no-show of the engineer. Make sure Plusnet actually check with Openreach and not rely purely on their own systems.