Reporting a phone fault is ridiculously difficult!

[#1]

My phone line has no dial tone and when someone calls me it rings (and shows their caller ID okay) but when I answer it's just a lot of loud noise and crackling.

It seems there is no (obvious) online method for reporting phone faults. The best I could find is the troubleshooting test, but I've run it several times and it fails every time then just tells me to call an 0800 number. But how exactly am I supposed to do that when my phone line is faulty?

I've also tried using the 'chat' function, picking the 'Looking for help' option, but it always just states no-one is available and to call a number. Again, how am I supposed to do that?

I have limited credit on my mobile and I'm on a very tight budget – hence why I've just joined Plusnet – so I can't afford to use it all up on a single support call (with current wait times approaching 15 minutes). Moreover I don't see why I should have to. It is not reasonable to expect your customers to foot the cost of reporting faults with YOUR service! At the very least it should be possible to report faults online and/or provide a call-back option when call queues exceed a few minutes.

[#2]

0800 numbers are free to call even from a mobile.

[#3]

Thanks, I (obviously) didn't know that. I'm only on a PAYG plan and I thought they would still be charged.

They definitely used to be because one ate £15 of my credit a couple of years ago.

[#4]

Call queues are now reportedly over 30 minutes long… grrr!

[#5]

It looks like you've reported the fault to us online last week. It was passed to Openreach and a ticket raised on your account.

Checking the latest updates, we've been advised an engineer should be assigned within the next 48 hours.

I apologise for the inconvenience caused.

[#6]

Thanks Gandalf, an engineer arrived out of the blue yesterday and eventually traced and fixed a fault in the cabinet.

I didn't know the fault had already been reported previously because whenever I ran the troubleshooter test in Firefox it always just ended up on an error page with a number to call. It suddenly occurred to me yesterday to try another browser and lo and behold it worked okay in Chrome.

Moderator's note by Mike (Mav): Full quote of preceding post removed as per Forum rules.

[#7]

Happy to hear the fault was fixed!

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@Angstony wrote:
I didn't know the fault had already been reported previously because whenever I ran the troubleshooter test in Firefox it always just ended up on an error page with a number to call. It suddenly occurred to me yesterday to try another browser and lo and behold it worked okay in Chrome.

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Thanks for that feedback. Could this help with @PlusnetLiam's investigations?