Extremely frustrating experience

[#1]

They have now put all new equipment in for my line at the exchange. The engineer says he is hopeful that this will solve the problem of the drop outs. Is it possible for you guys to reset my IP profile, so I can see if it stays up this time?

[#2]

A reset of the profile will occur itself within 3 to no longer than 5 days.
The only reset we can do is for stuck profiles, which only occur when the 3 to 5 days did not do the normal job when it was supposed to.

[#3]

Quote from: thesheep

Engineer is here at the moment. ...

very seriously doubt it was an engineer ? 
Much more likely to be a technician 
there is a very clear difference
and I'm not an engineer - 

[#4]

Quote from: P

A reset of the profile will occur itself within 3 to no longer than 5 days. The only reset we can do is for stuck profiles, which only occur when the 3 to 5 days did not do the normal job when it was supposed to.

You guys need to get your story straight. I was told in reply to my support ticket that I should let you know if the IP profile didn't reset after 2 days. Now you are saying you can't do anything until after 5 days.
The fact is that since there was a confirmed fault with my line, and a BT engineer came out and did a whole bunch of changes which he thinks should solve the problem, means that it makes sense to reset the profile straight away. Why make your customer wait for 2 days or 5 days to get it back to normal?
Yeah, I know, there's a policy... or it's BT's policy, or whatever.
Anyway, the stuff the engineer did on Friday doesn't seem to have helped. I'm getting loads of dropped connections/stalls this morning again.
Plusnet, I have a very mixed impression of you guys. You have a sort of corporate 'blanket' response thing going on, which is useless. But then some of your support team are excellent (several of the ones I've spoken to, including James). You need to back-peddle a bit on the 'cut and paste' responses. Then you'll be great.

[#5]

frustrating - read my post "Where is my Router" - I am a new customer and can't even get connected even though I migrated from Tiscali where connection was OK.

[#6]

Hi Philip
I read your thread. Must be very annoying. I know how it feels.
My reading of the situation is that a lot of the problem is with the way the broadband industry (and other many other industries) are set up right now. It is all to do with reducing costs, economies of scale and so on. In your case, some of the problem was with the supplier system, automated ordering, and so on. The way Openreach works is also very inefficient; because they are tasked with providing a 'level playing field' to all providers, they can't be too linked to BT. Thus it is actually impossible for us, as end customers, to contact Openreach at all! More automated systems, more problems for humans.
In terms of Plusnet, I think they have a quality issue with the process of replying to tickets. Maybe their response staff are over worked and under paid. Either way, in many cases it appears that brains are not really being engaged before they respond to things, using 'standard response' templates. To be fair this is common across the entire service sector these days. I think the only reason we're able to argue about this is because Plusnet have taken the brave step of providing a public forum. It is much easier to treat customers as numbers and give them no voice at all. And some of the Plusnet support staff seem to genuinely care, and really do try to solve the problem, instead of just passing you one step down the conveyor belt line. Unfortunately, I think the conveyor belt mentality is still causing problems a lot of the time.
I've found you are more likely to get a human response by posting on this forum.
I'm not convinced I'd get anything better from another mainstream ISP like Tiscali, Virgin, etc. They all work in the same basic way. It is all about shaving margins, economies of scale, and making profits.

[#7]

have u seen the o2 advert on t.v saying there voted number one for customer satisfaction what a joke. My sister is with o2 as she has a mobile contract with them so gets broadband for somthing like 8 pounds. i put her on o2 as she is at uni and needs it for genral web page surfing so i didnt worry about signing her up with some one not as good as plusnet for broadband connection and cs.
Ive lost count the amount of times ive had to go on to the o2 site to log complaints when her service is down as when she rings up she is lucky to get though to any one and the web site offers not even 1% of help and surrport/tickets/forum ect as what plusnet does.
Yes its very anoying when you have connection issues but plusnet are the best i have delt with in getting issues sorted but when bt get involved even the best isp on the plant are stumped by bt wholesales cs and getin things fixed.
have a read of this theard http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,68725.0.htmland look what pipex did to this customer to try and fix a line fault its taken plusnet to point out what they did to this customer. No under hand tatics are used like that here at plusnet yes it takes alot longer to get line faults fixed but least plusnet see them though to being solved and not using easy fix's.
Good luck solving whats making your line drop. theres a cheap and cheerful way of seeing if theres anything in you home or coming from neiouburs house that is interfering with your line and its and old radio tuned of station and walk round the house and see if u get any noise from electrical appliances cant rember if its fm, or am u do it on. there is a report of a person finding the fault of there connection drops being with the neibours old style pc monitor.

[#8]

its an AM radio tuned at the lower end

[#9]

Indeed, take a look here. An AM tuner tuned mid-station around the 612Khz mark.

[#10]

Update: my broadband is still not working.
It's been well over a week since the BT engineer was here, and failed to fix the problem.
Plusnet support centre people say that the matter has been returned to BT and that "this is still being investigated by their diagnostics team". This has been going on for a week. I don't really understand why they can't supply a little bit more information. What are they testing now? What actions are they taking? When do they expect to report back?
On the positive side, Plusnet have sent me a mobile broadband USB device, so I can do basic web surfing/email in the meantime. This is a good service idea from them, and definitely better than nothing. Well done.
However, I am still suffering with a very crippled broadband service. Although the mobile thing works, it is slow speed and capped at 1GB per week. So I do need my real broadband to be sorted out quickly. Is there no way to get more information from BT? I have a suspicion that they're not doing very much about it.

[#11]

Hiya,
I'm really sorry that this problem is still going on.
Fortunately, you're fault hasn't just been sat within BT's diagnostics team.  Although it's there currently, they have done some testing on your line and they're not able to pick up on any fault.  We've passed your fault back to them again and I strongly suspect they'll be looking to get a further engineering visit out again before long.
We'll let you know once you've heard back from BT and hopefully we'll be able to get this sorted out once and for all.

[#12]

I just had a phone call from someone at PlusNet, who left a message on my machine saying that my connection has not dropped in the last 1 day and 5 hours, and BT can not find any fault.
I have tried to call back but the system says that the queue time is 20 minutes... so I've left another ticket, and this is what I said:
I reported this fault to you almost 4 weeks ago. It is an intermittent fault, as you will see from your logs, and sometimes the connection drops very frequently, and other times it seems to stay up for quite a long time.
After the engineer came 2 weeks ago, the fault was clearly not fixed. BT have had the fault back again for around 10 days and I have heard nothing until now. Please provide some details about what they have done to rectify the fault. Just saying that it hasn't dropped for a day now is not any good. It is an intermittent fault. Have they actually done something new to fix it? And what was that?
My current actual throughput on my connection is still below 1 Meg. If BT believe they have fixed the fault, then clearly they should reset my IP profile, and we will see if it stays up or not. I can't believe after a fault like this they still want to make me wait 3-5 days before the IP profile resets itself. Especially if they think they have fixed the problem.
You need to take a tougher line with your supplier - BT. I have been holding on now for nearly a month with a rubbish internet connection.

[#13]

I can now confirm the connection is still dropping.
And this is what annoys me most:

Quote

Internal: Spoke to BT repeats, the current connection is over a day ongoing so they didn't want to investigate further until we confirmed with the EU that they still had problems. VM left.

What do they mean they don't want to investigate further? They've had this now for over 2 weeks. What has been going on in that time? Why am I told absolutely nothing?

[#14]

Quote

Why am I told absolutely nothing?

That should never happen and is totally unacceptable.
I will chase this with my colleagues when I get in to work in the morning.

[#15]

Quote

That should never happen and is totally unacceptable. I will chase this with my colleagues when I get in to work in the morning.

I still haven't heard anything more...