Having a giggle?

[#1]

Nice one. After getting a stupid line speed of 5Mb/s on the advertised 17Mb service and waiting a few weeks now for upgrade to fibre, I'm told that my improved line speed would be 2Mb/s! In case anyone reading doesn't know that's below the acceptable speed for standard broadband.

"The order we placed to change your upload speed has completed.

Your upload speed is now 2Mbit/s."

This was sent on the day I'm meant to have my fibre up and running.
I'm thinking Plusnet won't last much longer. Staff are too stressed and digging their own grave. Probably want to be buried with BHS.

**************************************
Attached is the speed I'm getting on fibre today. Does anything PN do constitute a breach of contract or is it because you are providing the service and we are locked in by direct debit, you consider yourselves master? Is customer ever right in your reaction. Do we ever deserve a refund?

Please refund me the cost of 1 month equivalent fibre broadband cost. That is how long I have been receiving substandard service. Surely it amounts to a lie when you write to your customers that they will receive their service on such and such a date but they don't. My fibre was supposed to be active on 21st
September. See message below emailed to me.
Dear Mr 'mug£££', Thank you for your response. Your fibre order is due to go live on the 21.09.16, This is the reason you are not getting fibre speeds as yet. If you have any questions please call 0800 432 0200 Kind regards, Ja**es Bo***ngton

[#2]

Unbelivable

[#3]

Good Morning, 

I do believe that this is more of a misunderstanding than anything, the speed mentioned is the upload speed, the download for the package you have chosen is 40Mb/s which your line can absolutely handle according to the checks we can run.

The reason you were receiving a lower speed than the 40Mb/s is your speed profile at our side had stayed on the ADSL profile, not allowing the full connection, I've amended this now and if you restart your router you should be getting the expected speeds.

The 2Mb for upload should be an improvement too if you are coming from ADSL as generally you'll never see more than 1Mb upload on an ADSL line,.

Please let me know if there are any issues

[#4]

Paul why do we over and over again get new people coming and saying this same problem?

Plusnet staff then say as you have said and then done, can't PN do these things automatically and save upset customers and extra work for you?

[#5]

It's a totally valid point, and there are automated systems that pick up these issues, coming from the provisioning department, this was what i dealt with day in and day out for quite a while, the automated systems pick up most of the orders and changes without a hitch, but there are those that don't get picked up, due to human or system error, nothing is infallible unfortunately.

I can however assure you that work is always ongoing to improve these things, it makes life easier for us aswell as you  

[#6]

Don't confuse upload with download. If you are on the "Unlimited Broadband" package, you will be limited to 40Mbps download and 2Mbps upload. If you run a speed checker, you should see those numbers reported separately. If you see numbers close to 40/2 (maybe a bit less, but not a lot less) then you are getting what you are paying for,

2Mbps upload may not seem very much, but If you are mostly web browsing it is fast enough to get the HTML request packets up the line from your computer to the web site, for the replies packets to come down from the web site to your computer at 40Mbps. That's because request packets are much smaller than the reply packets.

Of course, if you often upload large files onto the internet, or use cloud storage or P2P regularly, it's not so good and the cheap product is not what you want. If you pay more, you can get up to 80/20.

If you are using the Hub-1 router, you can find data on line speeds under the Troubleshooting / Helpdesk tab. Mine, for instance, shows

6. Data rate:	1999 / 39952
7. Maximum data rate:	26407 / 80920

My line is good (I'm close to the green cabinet) and would support 80/20 if I paid for it, but I'm only paying for 40/2 so that's what I'm actually getting. Further down. I have

11. Data sent/received:

164.4 MB / 7.3 GB

My router was restarted aboout a day ago, so that represents about a day's worth of web browsing, emails, video streaming and whatnot for me and my family. You can see that the amount of upload(sent) data is actually quite small compared to the download(received) data and a ratio of 2:40 is plenty.

[#7]

Darkfire's explanation regarding line profile not being amended following an upgrade reminds me that this exact same failure wasted a lot of my own time a year ago, both in performing numerous speed tests (now known to have been futile,) and subsequently sitting in a queue before another failure at Plusnet was identified as causing the problem.

I have recently summarized the numerous difficulties here: https://community.plus.net/t5/Plusnet-Feedback/Unwilling-to-waste-any-more-time/m-p/1369158

It really gives me no pleasure to appear again on these forums talking about these things, but unfortunately we see the same mistakes being made over and over again, (plus a few new ones to add a little variety!).

On reflection, and after my own experiences last year, I'm wondering why I recommended my elderly friends to upgrade to Plusnet fibre (https://community.plus.net/t5/Plusnet-Feedback/Plusnet-customer-service-gets-no-better/td-p/1366277). They are having the same run-around as I had last year, and no doubt they are wondering what they did to upset me! Perhaps they think that I don't like the meals they sometimes give me.

JHunter makes some very interesting points in his recent post https://community.plus.net/t5/Plusnet-Feedback/Plusnet-Dysfunction/td-p/1370182. He correctly draws attention to the role of Openreach in all this and questions their relationship with Plusnet and BT. I'd take it a stage further and question whether the industry regulators are fulfilling their intended roles, among them preventing abuse of a dominant market position. (I also think it odd that a lot of public money seems to have gone into upgrading the communications infrastructure now in private ownership, while revenue from telecoms heads off in the direction of overpaid footballers instead of being reinvested ..... don't get me started on that one.)

The BT privatisation did a great deal for the antiquated phone network and the inflexible way in which it previously operated, bringing many vast improvements. But that was pre-internet. The internet is now the lifeblood of almost everything we do, we depend on it for so much. The country, - commerce, industry, health, etc., all depend on it.

Can we really bumble and bungle along in the way described every day in these pages, or is it time for a radical re-think into who owns and manages the communications backbone, and who provides effective regulation to ensure a first-class service?

[#8]

I must confess that I had this problem too, with the PN server setting not being increased from the ADSL value after upgrading. But once I realised what was wrong, I went onto chat and the operator fixed it in a moment.

I suspect that when BT do a line upgrade, they don't always tell PN that they've done it so the PN system, which is waiting for that notification, doesn't react and move things along.

[#9]

Bob, your conclusion regarding the cause my well be correct, and thanks for mentioning it.

Unfortunately you didn't say when this occurred or how long the chat queue was.

This happened to me a year ago, and it is still happening right now. Isn't it reasonable to suggest that Plusnet should identify why it is happening, and correct the cause? Instead it continues, and every time it does we the customers have to waste chunks of time waiting for it to be sorted out.

Remember that with this specific issue, by definition it occurs after an upgrade requiring the involvement of the customer, and he may not feel too confident about it. He doesn't NEED the ensuing anxiety, self-doubt and further waste of his time, through no fault of his own.

I'm sure that this isn't the only recurring problem, and Plusnet would do well to routinely analyse customer contacts to identify recurrent issues and then take action to prevent them. I've said before on these forums that we don't get in a queue to chat or speak to someone because we want to. If Plusnet did more to stop things going wrong at the rate reported on the forums, there would be no reason for us to keep contacting them. Wait times solved.

With numerous problems, and no way of making contact which doesn't involve a long wait, it all seems a bit arrogant to me. People, myself included, are already using the forum to raise their individual issues because they have been so frustrated with other methods. You would think that Plusnet would be embarrassed by this, and restore the ticket system so that at least we can raise our issues privately, and carry on with our lives. The immediacy, (sorry, no, it's certainly not immediate!) ...... the implied requirement for instant attention of phone or chat is not always required, and you would think that a few tickets in an inbox would help even out the workload.

[#10]

@arktos

Since you ask, it was last week, on the 13th.

I started at 43rd in the chat queue and waited about 25 minutes for my turn. The chat session lasted about 3 minutes, by the end of which the problem had been rectified.

The 25 minute wait was ample time to pre-type what I was going to say and have it ready on the screen to copy and paste into the chat box when it came up, so that no time was wasted explaining the problem. I spent the rest of the 25 minutes at the keyboard doing what I would have been doing anyway.

I was pleased with the service, and said so.

[#11]

Well, good for you, Bob. Some of us have enough to worry about in life without Plusnet shortcomings giving us more problems to address.

We are all different, you didn't seem to mind, and evidently appreciated the experience to the extent that you apparently thanked them for it.

But there are an awful lot of people currently posting on threads indicating that they are being badly inconvenienced by poor customer service, and where my experiences have matched theirs then I am happy to add my support for them, even though it obviously can't retrospectively assist my own past issues.

If I find myself unable to empathise with the theme of a thread, then I discretely move on to other threads to which I can better relate, rather than undermine the valid points being made by others. I like to contribute towards points being made by others, not subtract from them. I think that this is called "cohesion".

Despite the current issues which I have raised on other threads in the course of trying to help someone else, it nevertheless remains a fact that Plusnet give me, personally, a good, rock-steady line speed. But I wouldn't normally mention that in a thread where people are expressing anxiety about their own poor connections.

It wouldn't help them and they wouldn't appreciate it one bit.

[#12]

@arktos

Yes, as you say, we are all different.