Hi,
I've had an issue with my broadband which I raised as a fault on the 15th April.
I've been getting lots of connection drops and an upload speed of <0.5 mbs. The connection drops seem to come in bursts but the speed has been a constant. The symptoms occur with nothing but the test computer connected to the router and wireless turned off.
5 engineers have been to investigate during that time. Of those, the 2nd determined there was a problem with the wire between 2 poles but didn't have time to do anything about it. The most recent, on Thursday, detected a fault at the box and went outside to investigate further. Nothing was obvious outside so he returned to repeat the test and it was still faulting. He went outside again and still couldn't see anything that might be causing the fault so he cleaned up the connections on the distribution point, repeated the test and this time it passed.
He reset the line and the numbers looked good (21 down/5 up), so I was hopeful that the issue was resolved.
I detected no dropouts the following day and the speeds were still good so I stopped running my line checker.
This morning however, the connection dropped again so I ran a speed test and the upload was back to 0.5. I set the checker up and sure enough the line dropped again within the hour.
This afternoon I received a call from Plusnet telling me that the problem had been resolved. I explained what I'd seen this morning and was told that 3 drops had been detected in the past 48 hours and that was well within tolerance. When I mentioned the upload speed he offered to send out an engineer.
This evening I received another call from Plusnet to book the engineer appointment. He told me that I would probably be charged the £65 call out fee because there was currently no problem on the line. Apparently the acceptable tolerance for dropouts is 15 over 72 hours ... is this true? I can't find it anywhere in the Terms and Conditions.
He was quite curt and didn't want to have a discussion about the fact that those dropouts were on the back of over a month of dropouts and that the upload speed had also been outside of tolerance for all of that time. He just wanted to know whether or not I wanted an engineer booking and wanted to make clear the fact that I would have to pay for it.
Seems outrageous to me; all I want is a stable service at the speeds I'm paying for.
