Moved from Sky to Plusnet - same slow speeds at peak time

[#1]

Hi all,

I've recently moved to Plusnet Fibre from Sky Fibre Max due to serious issues with Sky download speeds at peak times. I was syncing with Sky at around 69 Mbps and was getting around 65 Mbps on speed tests off-peak, but every day around 6pm the download speeds slowly got worse with 4K streaming on Netflix practically impossible. Speedtests were revealing download rates of around 4 Mbps when it was at it's worse. I'm tech savvy as i work in the IT industry, so I have removed all possible variables and been through all the help material. Even with a single wired connection into the router, download speeds did the same thing every night from around 6pm to 11pm - very slow and unusable at times.

Since Sky customer service was terrible, I initially blamed the ISP for their poor service and I switched to Plusnet this week. In short, same problem - sync speeds are lower (52 Mbps) than Sky and off-peak download speed tests are about 50 Mbps which is fine. However, the download speeds have slowly gone down to around 40 Mbps from 6pm and it's now down below 10 Mbps meaning that streaming Netflix 4k is impossible. I have spoken to other residents in my estate who are attached to the same fibre cabinet and are having the same problems with broadband speed between around 6pm and 11:30pm every night. Given that I have had a complete change of ISP and I'm seeing the same issue, this suggests a problem with capacity at the cabinet, the exchange or both.

I do not know how to escalate this, or what needs to happen between Plusnet or Openreach to have this invesitgated. I have attached a BT Wholesale speed test which is better than the mainstream test sites, but still half the speed I was getting earlier in the day. Can you please provide advice or help on how we get this escalated.

Help!

[#2]

@Gandalf This user has the same issue that I detailed here - same exchange, same cabinet.

They've had the issue with two ISPs (Sky & now Plusnet). Someone needs to get this escalated with Openreach.

[#3]

Thanks for your post @gordonpa apologies for the delayed staff response and I'm sorry to see you're experiencing speed problems at peak times. Could you raise a fault to us at http://faults.plus.net posting back afterwards? We'll then get this reported through to our suppliers and an engineer arranged with you to investigate this. 

[#4]

All - I can confirm that this is now fixed, but no thanks to any ISPs who lamely deferred us to their FAQs and troubleshooting guide on multiple occasions.

I am very diasppointed - the only way this managed to get resolved was for another resident, who is connected to the same fibre cabinet with a different ISP, to send an email of complaint directly to the CEO of Openreach. They took it seriously and immediately arranged an engineer and full diagnostics of the fibre cabinet where it was determined that they had to "add a number of paths" to cope with additional capacity presumably between the cabinet and the exchange. 

He was with Sky and I'm with Plusnet and there are some on Talk Talk also impacted - it feels like we're doing your job for you, the response to my post was delayed yet Openreach responded directly in a much more timely fashion. Whilst I understand that most issues can be solved with onling guides and FAQs for Joe Average consumer, it should have had alarm bells ringing when it was reported to separate ISPs that multiple people on the same caibnet were experiencing the same issue, with multiple people experiencing extreme slowness with the wholesale speed checker. It demonstrates a lack of dutyful customer service or any advanced technical know-how.

Do you even get faults communicated to you by Openreach? If not, what are you doing to ensure you get them in future, and what are you doing to communicate these back to the consumer? What controls are in place to ensure that your service can be supplied by the underlying infrastructure? It's factual to state that any controls you do have in place aren't good enough as we've all suffered extremely poor service for weeks. I don't buy my service from Openreach, I buy it from you, yet when it came to the shove I got the customer service I needed from the third party.

You're incompetent at best.

[#5]

Thanks for getting back to me @gordonpa 

I'm glad to see this is fixed now although I'm not sure what you've said is entirely fair as we've not been provided an opportunity to fix the problem with your service by arranging an engineer. I'm afraid we can't raise a fault to Openreach without booking an engineer visit unless line tests show a definitive external fault as the supplier system is mostly automated.

We do get major service outages communicated to us by Openreach however this wasn't flagged as a major service outage. Openreach do routine maintenance on their infrastructure and advise on any planned engineering works. Again this wasn't flagging up as the case when we tested your line.

If you had reported a fault to us we'd have happily worked to get this fault fixed through an engineer visit. 

Let us know if there's anything else you'd need help with. Thank you.

[#6]

Because you don't find it fair doesn't make it not factual.

The original thread here by Neondusk (another fellow resident with exactly the same issue) was two weeks ago and highlighted that Openreach were already engaged and did a simple line test to no avail. You also advised that you "found no capacity issues" which further evidences that you do not have the tools in place yourself, or with Openreach, to accurately monitor the traffic and capacity on your service throughout the day. I added to that thread that I was a completely separate resident that had just moved to Plusnet from Sky with exactly the same issue, and your delayed response to me was "can we get more examples" when multiple residents on the same cab with the same issue should have been sufficient for you to take our complaint seriously.

My point in all of this was we collectively bypassed the ISPs' customer service teams and went to the CEO of Openreach to get resolution with the job being done within 24 hours once it was taken seriously. As I said in my previous post, we (the residents) got it done ourselves which in my IT-experienced eyes shows a lack of ownership and communication between you and Openreach, or the tools to troubleshoot cabinet / exchange related issues. Therefore, harsh or not, incompetent to do get it done yourselves.

I would suggest you sit with Openreach and perform root cause analysis discussing this whole issue end to end to analyse on how best to deal with these types of faults to prevent further arduous and protracted investigations should this fault arise again. I don't know how a non-technical average consumer would have been able to go through weeks of this to and fro "via a forum" script.

[#7]

Thanks for getting back to me @gordonpa 

I understand what you've said however we can't raise a fault into Openreach without booking an engineer visit should a line test not find the cause for the problem, and we have an escalation path into Openreach for repeated engineering visits but this doesn't mean we won't need to book another engineer visit unfortunately. 

We take all complaints seriously but this doesn't change the fact that there are supplier processes laid down we have to follow. However thank you for your feedback we will take what you've said on board.

Let us know if there's anything else you'd need help with.

[#8]

@Gandalf - please don't hide behind the "supplier" excuse. I buy my service from you, not Openreach, and if Openreach don't give you what you need then you need to escalate that internally and ensure that the process is reviewed. I suggest your place to start would be how this capacity issue slipped between the cracks and why no ISPs were kept in the loop from Openreach. This clearly led to a degraded service and resulted in this complaint which I'm sure Plusnet would like to avoid in future.

[#9]

Thank you for getting back to me @gordonpa

Once again I understand what you've said and I'm not trying to pass the buck, I'm simply explaining the process. 

We will take this on board but I can't guarantee a change.