After more than a week of calls, online chats, twitter conversations etc and more than a month of steadily falling speeds (and latterly absolutely no broadband connection at all) I have decided to leave Plusnet. You can't do that online though - you have to call. Perhaps unsurprisingly if you select the options for wanting to leave on the call system you get put right through to someone instead of waiting 40 minutes as you have to for technical support. Then you are told that if you leave the contract early there are charges. So what don't Plusnet understand about how a contract works?
Well almost everything it seems. They seem to think that if they give you a refund for time disconnected then that's all fine and you can't leave without penalty so long as they are refunding you. Well if they ask their in-house legal team I suspect they might get an 'it's not really that simple' answer. If someone enters into a contract for service X and does not get it then that person is, at a basic level, allowed to walk away without the counterparty who failed to deliver coming along many weeks or months later saying "look! look! we have X now - give us money!"
To put it in terms that might be better understood by Plusnet -you can't hold someone's broadband connection to ransom on the basis that you might, one day, be able to provide the service you said you could in the first place.
Plusnet's understanding of the law appears to be on a par with their ability to make their broadband network functional.
