topic Re: A fond farewell... in Business

A fond farewell...

Townman — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 17:37:26 GMT

Alas the time has come to say good bye on our business account. It has been great service at a fair price, with the only blots on the 18 months of the 24 month contract being BT caused. Big bullying BT brother forcing Plusnet to ditch happy business users and a protracted service outage due to two co-related cable faults into the village.

We would have stayed if allowed to. A move to BT Business was never going to be an alternative exit route. We went with Zen in the end.

The initial order processing was a bit rocky, but everything else has gone to plan, indeed better than forecast.

Kelly Communications rolled up at around 08:50 for an 8am appointment. Single crewed, no cherry picker and no blue ladders ... potentially grim as in rural areas telegraph posts are often dual service requiring insulated ladders. The ominous start did not get better when the engineer announced that they usually only did domestic installations and had only got short ONT fibre cables on the van. Delighted that he located something longer and was promptly able to get on with the installation.

Delighted beyond expectation that he was prepared to put the ONT in our preferred location, behind the bar, requiring a good deal of clipping to ceiling beams, wall edges and corners. Grateful that he worked from the location outwards, which enabled me to get on with the LAN installation changes long before the service was switched.

Having thwarted the engineer's plan to rip out the operational service to drag the new fibre O/H drop from the pole to the building ... he called up a mate with a cherry picker. In the meantime I got the router installed and configured ready for the swap. In the meantime they plodded on with the installation.

About 2pm they finished (around 5 hours end to end) somewhat later than I think he had hoped for, all I needed to do was to wait for Zen to activate the service. Whilst I fiddled with the configuration, it suddenly burst into life.

I noticed that the VoIP configuration appeared in the router and started to panic as I had not worked out how to connect the DECT phones - the Fritz!Box router supplied does not have the right telephone socket. I did manage to connect a DECT handset in time to receive the first call. Plusnet's CRM reports that the phone service was ceased at 3.30pm.

Managed to get the final handset configured around 5pm - the system does not always do what it says on the tin!!

This could have been much more painful, a working telephone line is vital to a pub /restaurant and our worst fears - days without a working voice service - have not materialised ... though we did come close to not being able to answer incoming days.

Kelly Communications exceeded expectations today. Zen's porting was faultless ... whish I could also say that setting up the Fritz!Box was a walk in the park. It has lots of bells and whistles ... somewhat enhanced by the 'think I had better check for updates' up date (5.57 to 5.80).

Plusnet - thank you for the excellent service - so sad that you forced us to place our business somewhere else!!

Re: A fond farewell...

jab1 — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 17:44:05 GMT

Glad it (nearly) all went well, @Townman 😀

Re: A fond farewell...

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 17:48:55 GMT

@Townman wrote:

.. the Fritz!Box router supplied does not have the right telephone socket.

This YouTube video says (at 0:35 and 1:42) that the router comes with a BT431A to RJ11 adaptor cable -

Zen : How to Setup your Digital Voice Service

Re: A fond farewell...

Townman — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 18:06:23 GMT

Interesting - I will re-check the scant documentation which came with the device - I am sure that thing was described as a "filter" which I know I did not need so I ignored it!

All Frtiz!Box devices I have seen previously have a proper telephone socket.

Re: A fond farewell...

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 18:15:22 GMT

Is the cable coming out of the phone handset/base hard wired, or is it a detachable RJ11 ?

Re: A fond farewell...

Townman — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 18:19:04 GMT

As it turns out, one is most certainly detachable as the base station now only has the power connected. There is now no problem, all four (two for two different DECT systems) are now all registered direct to the router.

That offers a shed load of rich functionality, such as directing calls from specific numbers (or none at all) to some handsets.

Re: A fond farewell...

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 18:34:22 GMT

I was just thinking if you wanted to connect a phone (with an RJ11/BT431A detachable cable), you 'could' probably use a spare RJ11/RJ11 DSL cable to plug directly in to the router's phone socket without the need for the filter/adaptor.

Re: A fond farewell...

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 20:27:46 GMT

@Townman wrote:

Alas the time has come to say good bye on our business account

Are you now completely Plusnetless ?, or do you still have a Plusnet at home ?.

Re: A fond farewell...

Townman — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 20:36:06 GMT

Still Plusnet for residential services

Re: A fond farewell...

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 20:40:36 GMT

Are you tempted to move that to Zen when your current Plusnet contract period ends ?

Re: A fond farewell...

Townman — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 20:52:25 GMT

Not in the slightest. Why pay more for the same?

The only reason we walked on the business service is BT pulled the rug from underneath us / Plusnet. Over the years I’ve had over 8 business accounts and have been very happy with the service. The years have not been entirely free of BTOR blunders, but I’ve found Plusnet has done the best within the limits imposed by BTOR’s rules. Fortunately I know where the buttons are within BT to pressurise BTOR.

It’s little know fact that BTOR determines what an ISP can or cannot escalate, not the ISP.

Re: A fond farewell...

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 21:01:16 GMT

Fair enough !

On your new Zen connection, was IPv6 enabled by default ?, there was a time when Zen would enable it on request.

You can test it with this - https://ipv6-test.com/

Re: A fond farewell...

Townman — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 21:07:42 GMT

Apparently not - something for another day. Today’s priority was business continuity during service hours. I managed to keep things on air, swapping between the Plusnet service and Zen more or less seamlessly during service.

The only issue which did arise was with the credit cards machines due to they having been configured incorrectly at sometime in the past by some one else.

Phone service swap was a close call. For a short time both the copper line and the VoIP were operating on the same number.

Re: A fond farewell...

jab1 — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 06:01:23 GMT

@Townman A quick call to Zen support - or even an email - will get IPV6 enabled.