Waiting for fibre connection

[#1]

I placed an order for upgrade to fibre on Dec 1st.
I received a Hub One in double quick time and set it up.
Good,good, I thought.

Since then, on a number of occasions, I have checked out:
https://www.btwholesale.com/adslchecker/

and over time I have noted the following:

There is an open order on your line which is due to complete by 07-Dec-2016.
There is an open order on your line which is due to complete by 09-Dec-2016.
There is an open order on your line which is due to complete by 12-Dec-2016.
There is an open order on your line which is due to complete by 14-Dec-2016.
There is an open order on your line which is due to complete by 16-Dec-2016.

I suspect that tomorrow (the sixteenth) this will be updated, amended and I will have a further wait.

As each date is reached a further waiting period is introduced.
Is this common?
Is there a reason why Openreach needs to keep setting back its completion dates?
They keep on putting off doing the work.
I speculate that Openreach is understaffed, very busy, or simply averse to working on our particular fibre cabinet.
I'm sure they have a very good excuse.
Perhaps the guy who services our cabinet is on holiday and no-one is sure exactly when he will be back?
Perhaps he is avoiding it because he considers our cabinet number to be unlucky?

I am becoming resigned to waiting at the permanent[?] back of this undoubtedly very long queue.

You know,
I don't believe it!!

Victor

[#2]

Looking at the order it's getting pushed back due to resource issues in the area, the order is showing as due for tomorrow so fingers crossed the engineer completes the work at the cabinet and it goes ahead.

[#3]

I'll post back with results or lack thereof, as and when,

I'm another of those whose overall experience with Plusnet has been good.

I don't blame PN for the delays. We are in the hands of the engineers.

Many thanks for looking into this, Chris.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

My Victor moment is over!!

Many thanks Chris and all at PN.

Finally was connected.

It hasn't actually taken that long.

If they had said it could take two-three weeks to complete, the whole experience would have been less frustrating. 

Well I must get away, I gotta go play on my Fibre connection

Victor

[#5]

good to hear that Victor

[#6]

Thanks for that link to BT Wholesale ( https://www.btwholesale.com/adslchecker/. ) I was wondering how to find out about my order for the Fibre Change.

I live in North Shropshire and the date it shows if I enter my phone number is down amongst the text at the bottom of tha page.  I placed an order on around December 19th and the date for the upgrade is showing as January 20th so almost exactly a month.  Not the ten days I had been led to expect.

My new router has arrived and seems to work fine and I am assuming it will also work fine once the connection has been patched over at the cabinet to give FTTC fibre. 

[#7]

i was told by customer services not to connect the router till they notified me of my line being fiber active

[#8]

Well mine is working fine.  I think it just has too change over from ADSL to VDSL (or some such) once the Fibre change is made.  I was on Plusnet before so all the settings are the same.

Its a far better modem with faster built in Hub (1Gb instead of.1Gb) and far better Wi Fi.   Since I have so much other gear connected I wanted to sort out my NAS drive etc etc and make sure they were OK.  They now work far better due to the faster Hub.

I am not sure why they would tell you not to connect it unless they want to avoid having two lots of calls to support. (One for new modem and one for fibre change over)

[#9]

i dont know either, but they also said i wouldnt get full speed until it was monitored over 10 days

[#10]

@grayerbeard - Sorry to hear of the amount of time your fibre order is going to take. I do apologise if you were lead to believe it should only take 10 days.

Fibre orders have a minimum lead time of 5 working days or 7 days when there are no bank holidays. Unfortunately they are still dependant on engineer availability to carry out work at the exchange/cabinet. It always seems busier around this time of year meaning extended provision times for fibre and with the bank holidays on top of this it's hard to give an estimate on the expected date until we've placed an order and heard back from our suppliers.

I'll pass feedback on regarding the expectation being set that it should only take 10 days.

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@grayerbeard wrote:

I am not sure why they would tell you not to connect it unless they want to avoid having two lots of calls to support. (One for new modem and one for fibre change over)

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I don't believe matter so much for existing customers moving to fibre as the hub one will automatically switch over when the connection changes.

However for new signups, we advise this as the router will likely not work on the previous providers connection without manual configuration providing the previous provider will allow the use of third party routers. Plugging the router in before our connection is active on new connections can also cause the auto-config to not run correctly when the connection does become live, therefore it may require a factory reset when the connection does go live to trigger the auto-config to run again, or alternatively manual set-up.

[#11]

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@ian4436 wrote:

they also said i wouldnt get full speed until it was monitored over 10 days

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I'm not entirely sure why this is advised on fibre, although it is called out on DSLchecker as well. It only really applies to ADSL during the training period.

[#12]

Thanks for those comments Harry.   Its so nice to get good straightforward information from you PlusNet guys.  Much appreciated.  I think my only problem with that new Modem is that its almost too easy and self healing I was for example rather confused by the way it sorted itself out without me being asked to enter a broadband password.   I think I would prefer a more difficult hackable modem but this one seems excellent for everyone.