Plusnet Service is great, but communication is lacking.

[#1]

Hats off to the very polite customer service personnel!

Plusnet is in the communication business, yes? In my opinion, communication is slightly lacking. I've been a customer with Virgin Media for many years, ever since they were Blueyonder, Ntl, Telewest, etc. etc., but £100 a month is crippling the home budget. Switching to another provider is extremely time-consuming,  frustrating and irksome.

TalkTalk Informed me that I needed to cancel my services with Virgin Media, booked an installation date (24th Feb). Evidently, they did not want to entertain my custom as they could not be bothered to attempt to help me retain my existing telephone number. Needless to mention, I cancelled the order.

Plusnet took me on, I paid the £49.99 installation fee and first months line rental, installation booked for (12th March), No such luck, it's postponed for another ten days due to Plusnet not communicating with Openreach and confirming the appointment with me. I was informed that my telephone number had been changed. "No thank you, says I, just retain the telephone number".

Should I be having doubts that I've decided to give Plusnet a chance? Should I be investing hours in telephone conversations, trying extremely hard to get a simple message across? JohnWJ

[#2]

Thanks for your post @JohnWJ and welcome to our community forums.

I'm sorry to see the experience you've had.

Having reviewed your order from what I can see your account was signed up online and we weren't made aware you wanted us to retain a certain telephone number so we placed the order with our suppliers requesting a random one. You'd have to enter the number in the box as pictured in the post Here for us to automatically import it.

Looking at the orders we've manually placed with our suppliers to retain your number, they've been rejected with the reason "Customer has no service with losing operator" which suggests that your number's no longer active so we can't import it. Does the number work? If it doesn't, can you remember when it stopped working?

The good news is that your number's owned by BT as the 'rangeholder' which means that it was first made on BT's network, so it'll be returned to BT in an 'available' state after 14 days of 'quarantine'. Quarantine is where a number is stopped on a different network to where it was made on, and before its released back to the rangeholder, the previous provider has a right to retain it for 14 days in case their customer changes their mind and returns to them.

Once the 14 days are up we'll be able to use the number when placing our order or renumber the line after the order completes. Let me know though if the number's actually working still so I can do a bit more digging.

[#3]

Deleted - @Gandalf gave a more informed answer.

[#4]

I have spoken to [CSA Removed], (Plusnet New Customer associate) today who stated that my order to Plusnet will need to be cancelled for the second time and reordered with Openreach as my previous order that had been cancelled and reordered was, yet again, being registered with a new number.

[CSA Removed] has assured me and confirmed via email that the order is now with Openreach and the installation date has been postponed until the 23rd March 2021 and I will be retaining my original telephone number. JohnWJ.

Moderators Note: CSA name removed as per Forum rules

[#5]

Thanks for getting back to me @JohnWJ 

I'm afraid that the order won't go through and it'll be rejected like the previous two we've placed that I can see with Openreach. Can you confirm if your number's currently active and if it isn't, when was it stopped?

[#6]

@JohnWJ I tried to call you just now to discuss this but there was no answer. No problem I'll try calling again tomorrow but if there's a good time for call, please feel free to call me on my direct number I've provided in the ticket Here.