Can't get fibre even thought I currently have it

[#1]

It's about that time when I am due to lapse out of co tract and even though I am a current Plus net customer on Fibre Unlimited I am looking through options including staying with plusnet.

A few days ago I had a period of 2-3 days outage caused by Openreach removing me and 60 other customers fron the cabinet. Ever since I have come back on services including plusnet are saying Fibre is not in my area and I can only be provided with bog standard broadband packages.

This is not only laughable but concerning. And frustrating as no one will offer me anything other than bog standard broadband.

So - have I been bumped down to broadband? If so, why? If not how can i get bt wholesale to stop misidentifying me.

[#2]

It's not uncommon for the availability checker to show no fibre available even when we're actually still providing the service. This can happen for a variety of reasons, most commonly if there's maintenance work at the cabinet. 

In these situations, the cabinet is just taken offline for any new orders which includes fibre migration orders to another provider.

What sort of speeds do you get when you run a speed test at https://speedtest.btwholesale.com?

[#3]

With that link as of right this second 30mbps down ~5mbps up which would convince me the service I am receiving is fine.

But very frustrating that I am now effectively locked in because I am not being appropriately recognised.

EDITED to 30 and 5 as I am posting on my phone and forgot to turn off data.

[#4]

Definitely still on fibre at those speeds. If you enter your post-code into the Openreach fibre availability checker on their website Here then choose your house number/name, does it give a status or a reason?

[edit]

Edited several times to fix the link, got there in the end.

[#5]

It says:
Better broadband is coming
Good news – we’ll be upgrading your area to Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) soon

As the max speeds i can currently get are around 30mbps does that mean I could potentially be seeing 70-80mbps availability soon and thats why its being a bit silly?

[#6]

It sounds like they're planning a Live to Live (L2L) migration moving lines from one cabinet to a closer cabinet to give improved speeds. These can generally take some time as Openreach would need co-operation from all the current service providers that are providing their service at the cabinet.

I suspect that's one of the reasons why they take a cabinet offline for new orders in these instances to avoid further complications while they're making the necessary arrangements to get the job done.

I can't confirm definitely whether this would be a L2L though, it may be worth filling out this formwize: https://www.formwize.openreach.co.uk/run/survey3.cfm?idx=505d040e0b080d to query this with their fibre enquiries team directly to see if they're able to give any more information about your specific cabinet.

Let me know how it goes.

[#7]

Just to add the good news is that if you want to stay with us on the same fibre product you're on, we can recontract you for a cheaper deal. 

The bad news of course is that you can't go elsewhere for fibre until the cabinet is back online unfortunately. 

[#8]

Moderators Note

This topic has been moved from Tech Help to My Account / Billing

[#9]

Thanks for this. I've submitted my enquiry but I hope it can be resolved quicker than the 28 days they state.

Do you have any guidance on how long these types of jobs can tend to take? This is very close to my upgrade window and the end of my contract period and I feel like I am being penalized and have been given no information from openreach about these infrastrcture changes.

I've got nothing against Plusnet as such but being in a situation where I can only retain fibre if I lock in another contract with yourselves is horrendous, particularly as it must be technically feasible to supply the service.

[#10]

No problem, the 28 day time-frame they've given is likely just for a response from the team. I can raise a similar request which goes to the same team and the response time is significantly quicker at within 3 working days. I'm happy to but before I do I've checked your line and the availability checker is showing FTTC/VDSL as available now.

There's no news as to what the the issue was, if it wasn't a L2L it may have just been maintenance. For reference, once the new cabinet is live, L2L's can generally take 4 to 6 weeks or longer.

Let me know if you have any issues shopping around so to speak.