Thinking of joining Plusnet mobile but worried about porting, especially this time of year.

[#1]

Hi, just joined to ask the following:

I have a PAC from current provider which I need to use fairly soon.  I'm considering taking up a Plusnet deal but I'm worried that porting my number over the Christmas/New Year period might prove especially problematic. 

If I order a sim tonight it might not be here until perhaps Thursday/Friday, so then with the weekend, Christmas Day, Boxing day and perhaps less staff between then and the New Year, am I risking a porting nightmare?

Any thoughts anyone?

[#2]

Oh well, I've ordered a sim now.

1-3 working days to post it and then another working day to activate. If it actually gets to me and is working by Christmas I think I'll try to start porting process on 27th December and hope for the best!

[#3]

Welcome to the Plusnet Mobile family, onzey!

The 27th would be a good date to begin your port - if you put in the request before 6pm, your port should complete on the 28th. (If you were to put the porting request in on the 28th, the port wouldn't be scheduled to complete until the 2nd due to the New Year break.)

Please let me know if you have any further questions

[#4]

Thanks for reply Michael.

If I had to begin my port on the 28th of December, which is a Thursday, would the port not complete on Friday 29th?

[#5]

I'm afraid not. As porting is a manual process, this is disrupted rather substantially by the holidays.

Ports on the 28th should go through on the 2nd January, and then anything submitted between the 29th December and 2nd January would process on the 3rd January.

[#6]

Thanks again for your response.

Have I understood correctly then that you are saying that Friday the 29th is a holiday at Plusnet?

So assuming I have a sim by then, if I had any issue at all there would be no point in trying to contact customer services on that day?

Or is it that the provider of the PAC is involved in the process and you can't guarantee they will be at work to do their bit?

Apologies if I'm being a bit dense. I just assumed Friday would be a working day. Therefore a manual process requiring 1 working day and started on Thursday would complete on the Friday in the same way as one started on Wednesday would complete on the Thursday.

[#7]

Or is it that the provider of the PAC is involved in the process and you can't guarantee they will be at work to do their bit?

---

This is pretty spot on.

On the Customer Service front, you have no need to worry, though - Customer Services are open throughout the Christmas period, including Christmas Eve (7.30am-7pm), Christmas Day (9am-7pm) and Boxing Day (9am-10pm).

On the 29th, our Customer Service team are open all day - 7.30am until 10pm. 

[#8]

That's strange. I just rang my current provider to check the expiry date of my PAC and during the conversation, if I understood correctly, the agent said using the PAC was nothing to do with them. She said it's the new provider alone that is responsible for applying the PAC and that they just wait for notification that it has been used to close the account.

[#9]

That's rubbish I'm afraid, the donor network is at least involved in releasing the number on porting day.

If you have the time (and the inclination) there's a really good description of how porting works here https://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Using-giffgaff/Porting-in-explained/ta-p/4221529 ( athough the link refers to porting into giffgaff the process is the same for all providers ).

From that you can see that it's largely a manual process and can understand why sometimes it goes wrong

[#10]

I moved to PlusNet mobile on 10th December and I am still waiting for my old number to port over.

It's now 20th December.

Fobbed off over and over again.

It's utterly pathetic. I'll be leaving PlusNet broadband and mobile as soon as I have time in the New Year.

Feel totally insulted.

Angus

[#11]

@angusbeare

That sounds particularly bad. Exactly the worry I had something like that might happen to me, particularly this close to Christmas.

I decided in the end not to take the risk over the holiday period so I started porting my number (from talktalk) to an old Tesco mobile payg sim yesterday and it was completed today. I'll port it to Plusnet in the new year if their service is good.

Thus far, Plusnet have emailed me to say my sim is in the post and another email says it is activated. Hopefully it will arrive before Christmas 🙂

[#12]

Hi @angusbeare,

I can see you've also started your own thread here: 

https://community.plus.net/t5/Mobile/Think-Plus-Net-has-customer-support-Think-again/td-p/1501464

Which I have replied to!

Thank you

-Oli

[#13]

Yes, I'm still here and I'm not going away until my number is ported.

Clearly, my advice is to NOT switch to PlusNet.  Try pulling you own fingernails out one by one instead. Far

more satisfying..