topic Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK? in Plusnet Feedback

Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

karmi — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:51:53 GMT

Fairly brief rant here.
The staff are somewhat good; very helpful when they actually reply that is although you might be waiting a few weeks for an actual reply.
The ISP itself (and I say the ISP; as the horrendous service I/we recieve is nothing to do with anything at _my_ end) has slowly but surely gone down hill over the years no doubt this is partially due to a huge increase in overall Internet contention as fast Internet has been adopted by the mainstream but there is absolutely no way on earth you can justify this service?
The internet between midnight and 8am? Average as you would expect. Any other time? Horrendous. So off peak getting between 13000-16000 (1.5-2mb) download speeds; 350k up (42k) and on peak getting 400-500k (50-60k) down and 350k up (42k). I am not talking about P2P; this is just in general; everything runs horrificly slow - you expect users in 2011 (lets say a household of 3 computers; hardly uncommon?) to use 512k on peak (the busiest time of the evening?)
Oh Plusnet PRO you say; £20 a month for a staggering 20gb usage allowance so you have a 'decent' connection? Average use of about 50gb a month on peak (not exactly hard even if you just factor in IPlayer/Youtube) and this will cost you £50 a month? Haha. Nice [Censored] joke.
Initially I was going to just move over to Pro because I was so happy with the lovely wonderful service I have recieved over all these years and couldn't be bothered with the hassle of swapping ISPs. The change to Plusnet Pro is due on the 3rd February; a request for interleaving/adsl upstream to be uncapped I put in on the 25th of January (a week ago) has still not been done. Yeah; Bethere sounds pretty damn good right now 24/3 £22/mo with a reasonable usage policy and decent routing so your not looking at horrible latency (45-50ms) to UK servers even off peak. Compared to Plusnet Pro's £50 a month for an average 50gb househould (which is very reasonable imho). Yep; should have done it a long time ago!
For all those who may try to tell me 'my exchange is overloaded' / 'your line is intermittent' - it really is not. my exchange has just been upgraded to adsl2 has completely fine capacity and im syncing 22800 with 19db... its entirely the traffic shaping plusnet enforce; and im currently on broadband premium afaik, £20 a month.. seems like a good price for 512k internet in 2011. not even consistent 512k either, varies between 200-600 spikes and is just generally awful.
Hey Plusnet! Wonder if it'll take you a week to answer the ticket for my MAC code? You just lost a customer of 6 years! Congratulations

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

ReedRichards — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:49:30 GMT

Sometimes the grass looks greener on the other side but when you get there, not so much. Please post back to say how you got on with your new ISP.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

jelv — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 09:03:46 GMT

Going to Be I'm sure that he will find that the grass is actually greener.
It's difficult to tease out how much of the responsibility for the current situation is Plusnet and how much is BT. Pricing and allowance is definitely down to BT.
Going to Be removes BT out of the equation.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

nozzer — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 09:41:34 GMT

If it was down to Plusnet everyone would be seeing the same problem surely? In my experience it's BT that's the problem, not PN. And if it's your line that's up the spout you're not going to see much of an improvement.
I had a line problem last year where the phone line failed and was replaced with a line which picked up interference during daylight hours only. This had the effect of reducing download speed to tiny values, but not all the time. Eventually (and after about two months of PN trying to persuade BT that the "new" line was faulty, it was changed for a new pair and, lo and behold, perfick performance restored. The BT technician (chappie number six!) who replaced the pair reckoned it was picking up some kind of HF from somewhere, although a line check couldn't find any!
So there you go....

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

adamwalker — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 10:00:22 GMT

Karmi,
I'm really sorry to hear about your problems and I'd like to help unless its too late, I'm happy to take ownership of your issues and give them the urgency they clearly deserve.

Quote
Hey Plusnet! Wonder if it'll take you a week to answer the ticket for my MAC code? You just lost a customer of 6 years! Congratulations Smiley

We have to respond within 5 days in order to comply with OFCOM regulations. However I've just checked your account and I can't see a request for a MAC key. Please bear in mind that we aren't able to accept cancellation requests via a support ticket. All such requests would need to be made either in writing or by a phone call to our customer options team on 0845 1406002

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

jelv — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:48:29 GMT

@karmi
You have to remember that it spite of Plusnet's preference for any support requests to be via the ticket system they steadfastly refuse to accept this method for MAC requests.
This is policy is deliberately designed to annoy and inconvenience customers who have the temerity to want to leave.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

Paulg78 — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:39:58 GMT

Well if my broadband speed isn't sorted out, I won't be staying with PN after my 12 month contract finishes in July, I reported the problem on the 12th January and the faults department enabled interleaving which is great and my line is nice and stable but I've lost 30% of my line speed , I've asked if someone could reset my SNR, I'd be well happy but getting it done is like banging your head against the wall, everyone I've spoke or sent messages to either say they can't do anything or I get ignored for days on end , getting slightly cheesed off now

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

adamwalker — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 09:21:00 GMT

jelv,

Quote
This is policy is deliberately designed to annoy and inconvenience customers who have the temerity to want to leave.

This isn't the case, regulations state that we need to provide at least 2 channels of communication for cancellation requests. The reason we decided to opt for by phone or letter is because we want to talk to our customers. We can't stop anyone from cancelling if they need to but we would be concerned if we received such a request and will always want to see if there is anything we can do to help.
Paulg78,
I've checked your account and can see that the next step for yourself would be an engineer visit. Please respond to the ticket and feel free to give me a nudge on here when you do so, that way I can make sure it's given the appropriate urgency.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

jelv — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 10:30:48 GMT

Quote from: _Adam_Walker_
The reason we decided to opt for by phone or letter is because we want to talk to our customers.

So why do you make it impossible for anyone whose work means they cannot phone during weekday work hours?
If you extended the hours on that department to 9pm there wouldn't be half as much unhappiness about the policy.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

Strat — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 10:41:08 GMT

I have to say Jelv has a very good point there.
You want to talk to people requesting a MAC but you make it very difficult by only being available during office hours.
Therefore they have only one choice but to write a letter which means no dialogue and little chance of a resolution.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

adamwalker — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:16:20 GMT

Quote
So why do you make it impossible for anyone whose work means they cannot phone during weekday work hours?

I'd advise anyone who can't find a good time to call during the opening hours of the customer options team to send a letter, after all we do take the notice period as starting from the date the letter was sent.

Quote
Therefore they have only one choice but to write a letter which means no dialogue and little chance of a resolution.

We can and do call customers back in the interests of customer support and retention.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

avatastic — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:12:08 GMT

Quote
We can and do call customers back in the interests of customer support and retention.

As asked time and time again; Why not let customers raise a ticket to ask for a MAC?
None of this we're adhering to the OFCOM guidelines by providing 2 methods fobbing off, a straight and honest answer please.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

linux — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:14:31 GMT

Quote from: _Adam_Walker_
Quote
Therefore they have only one choice but to write a letter which means no dialogue and little chance of a resolution.

We can and do call customers back in the interests of customer support and retention.

So why does that preclude communication via a support ticket instead of a letter?
I don't see any difference between a letter stating "I want to close my account" from a support ticket stating "I want to close my account", apart from the extra time and effort required for the former.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

MisterW — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:25:08 GMT

Quote
I'd advise anyone who can't find a good time to call during the opening hours of the customer options team to send a letter, after all we do take the notice period as starting from the date the letter was sent.

In that case , I would have thought accepting a request via a ticket is better ( for Plusnet ). By the time you've got the letter I would guess that most of the 5 days have elapsed and you need to raise a MAC immediatley, giving little time to call the customer. At least with a ticket you would have 5 days ( as long as the ticket is correctly routed! ) to get in touch.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

jelv — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:46:28 GMT

I think you are confusing the 5 day timeslot for providing the MAC and the 10 day notice period on all accounts. I bet they still only provide the MAC code 5 days after receipt of the letter.
As the MAC is 5 working days (i.e. normally 7 days as it will include a weekend) and the contract is 10 days it could easily mean that the MAC is provided after the 10 day notice period has expired!

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

johpal — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:53:28 GMT

When I requested my MAC last year, I couldn't get through on the 'phone. I wrrote a letter and PN responded by raising a ticket!
The grass did look greener with O2 and still is. I admire PN for many things, but instead of BT learning from PN how things should be done, IMHO, BT has beaten PN into submission with a big stick and said "You do it our way!"
Anybody with experience of BT as an ISP will know what I mean.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

karmi — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 22:41:06 GMT

Hi adam thanks for your response and I do apologise for my tone in the first message; was extremely annoyed with the fact I couldn't get anything done on the Sunday night due to the problems with my connection and took it out on the forum.
As I said initially; you can't fault the Plusnet staff whatsoever and they are always top notch (even if it takes a little time to get a reply because presumably; they are very busy). Once again it is just ashame how PN (who I used to regard as the best ISP in the UK and have reccomended about 5 of my friends to join over the past 5 years who have been happy ever since) have been forced into this by as you lot are saying; presumably BT.
With the whole MAC code thing its no wonder you have to phone up/write a letter as it becomes more personal and allows Plusnet to retain customers; I work for Halifax and we do the same if anybody wants to leave we have some deals to encourage them to stay or will sort the problem to keep them as a customer. The only issue is most people who want to leave are very stubborn and generally refuse any sort of deal!
I very much doubt it is infact to do with my line; granted I have just moved to ADSL2+ and prior to this when i was on adslMAX 8mb I never synced below 8128/448 afaik and have had very few problems up until recently when the traffic shaping came into play. I am not even concerned about download speeds to a huge extent; if we had equivalent of lets say 5mb on peak and the normal service off peak that'd be fine; but 400-600k on peak between 3-4 users? Which leads me on to the fact my next door neighbour on Bethere with far worse line stats then me (he only syncs at about 10800; guess he has a poor quality line) can ping UK servers @ 15-20ms with 0ms jitter, whereas on peak my latency is 50-90ms with like 15ms jitter and offpeak its just 40ms constantly with 0ms jitter (with interleaving ON; used to have 20-25ms with it off on adslMAX).
I am HOPING tomorrow when I move to Plusnet pro that on peak the service is good (latency wise primarily) and will stick with it for a little while to see how it goes / how much it costs me per month and as I am not on any sort of contract can just go to Bethere if its too expensive / service isnt as expected. Only time will tell....
IF a PN employee reads this; can you turn interleaving OFF On my line? I think its automatically turned on because I kept resyncing to change gateways (doing a 30R cycle on router, probably flagged up as BT as DCN or something) but yeah I hopefully won't have to do this as off tomorrow. According to last ticket update; PN Pro migration @ mid day tomorrow, upsteam uncapped also, but no mention of when interleaving will be turned off? Question #39272303 btw.
Thanks.

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

Oldjim — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 09:51:05 GMT

For future reference
You do not need to resync when changing gateways - just disconnect the and reconnect the connection to Plusnet

Re: Plusnet now worst ISP in UK?

adamwalker — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:34:42 GMT

Karmi,
Thanks for the reply and the kind words about us, I'll make sure interleaving is turned off for you tomorrow.