Plusnet - posting Modem-router too late?

Plusnet may be wonderful in other respects, but my transfer to them for upgrade to VDSL hasn't started well.

12 days after my order, they have emailed to say that they have only today (T-2) despatched my router - which "should arrive in 3-5 working days". Worst case: I will have a VDSL service but without ADSL kit to put on the end of it - and so no Broadband at all - for five (calendar) days.

Of course the kit may arrive much sooner in this case - but if it doesn't, then Plusnet make it very clear that it is my problem not theirs. And even if I hit lucky, this timing is likely to mean problems for a fair proportion of new customers to whom they send the kit late and slowly.

For anyone to whom a multi-day outage (apparently caused by nothing other than lethargy by their ISP) might be difficult, then a different ISP might be a better choice.

I hope you don't have an issue which needs reporting to BT Wholesale because there's currently a seven day delay on looking at tickets in that pool.

I think BT do something similar. I don't really understand why!

Because Plusnet are BT

In reply to a post by JohnGeddes:

Of course the kit may arrive much sooner in this case ...

It did - in the post (First Class), 10 hours after the 00.30 email in which they told me that they had despatched it "today". (Plusnet has been unable to tell me whether that email was late reporting from the previous day's despatch, or early reporting of that day's despatch).

So Plusnet seem to be alarming people needlessly (First Class post is better than a "3-5 Business Day" service, and - at least in my case - they are shipping earlier than they report). That alarmism isn't cost-free: I very nearly exercised the right (which BT, as my previous landline supplier, had informed me about) to abort the whole job until a day or two before upgrade - because the consequences of their end-of-window delivery date were too difficult to accept.

But Plusnet are still despatching too late. If they pulled their finger out, Plusnet could despatch this kit say eight working days ahead (their minimum lead time seems to be 10 working days), saving money by choosing Second Class, and still give their customers less worry.

But from the conversation I had with their agent yesterday, I'm not hopeful of improvement. He was charming and very professional, but he had clearly had more training on condolence skills ("Yes, I can see why that is worrying you") than on skills in listening to customers who might just be telling your organisation something they need to learn from, and then giving the customer the impression that you might just feed this back to someone who could do something to improve things.