Where do I stand regarding cancellation?

[#1]

I’ve only been with plusnet for a month and I’ve been plagued by issues since day 1.

I would like to know where I stand regarding cancellation. I don’t feel like it would be fair of plusnet to charge me any cancellation fees due to the downtime and frequent disconnections I’ve had but companies in general are notorious for being rather unfair in that regard.

So am I going to be held to ransom and be forced to stay with a company providing me with sub-par performance or buy my way out? Or would plusnet be honourable and admit that they have been unable to provide me with a fit-for-purpose product and allow me to move on without penalty?

[#2]

This depends on the steps taken so far. If a fault has been open, a line fault has been identified but it's not fixable, in that situation you should be fine, though with the caveat that a line problem is going to follow you to another provider, so in some cases it's best to stick it out otherwise you'll just be starting diagnostics again with another ISP.

If there's not a line problem however, and it's an issue with wifi interference or something to that effect then that's different, as it's not something plusnet can control-the issue would be caused by one of your neighbours.

One of the agents dealing with your fault or possibly one of the staffers should be able to give you a better answer, but as a rule before free cancellation will be considered you'll have had quite a few engineers and essentially had the line checked end to end with no improvement. If you've not been through this yet then you'll likely be held to term as to get out free you have to allow plusnet to exhaust all the options they have to fix the service first.

[#3]

Thank you for the reply.

Unfortunately, I want to cancel because I have a fault that is on going and barely anything gets done about it. It’s not so much the fault, it’s more about the way it is being handled (or not in my case) that makes me want to leave. I’ve already had an engineer out for a different fault which developed on day 1 with plusnet and fixed on day 8 which wasn’t actually a fault in the end because it turned out to basically be a closed port on plusnet’s end (or something along those lines but the openreach engineer assured me that it did not require his attendance and should have been picked up and rectified before referring it to openreach). Now I have a frequent disconnect problem that has been going on for 2 weeks. Bare in mind I’ve only been with plusnet for 4 weeks, 3 weeks of problems is not very impressive. Especially as I had 3 years of flawless service from BT on this exact same line. So after all that, I have almost no faith that plusnet are capable of identifying and fixing the problem.

And as for inheriting line problems, I didn’t have a single problem for the last 3 years with BT. My problems only appeared on the day plusnet took over the line. Coincidence? Seems unlikely. I’m pretty sure if I was to return to BT the problem would be dealt with swiftly even if I did take the fault with me.

Definitely not interference from neighbours because I don’t have any, I’m very rural. And would that really cause a complete disconnect of service? I don’t mean I’m being disconnected from the WiFi, I mean I get a complete loss of service while the router disconnects and reconnects to broadband, multiple times a day, sometimes multiple times an hour. This has been confirmed by those radius graphs that plusnet do, and the answer provided was ‘there is definitely something wrong but we don’t know what it is’

And then I get into the endless loop of being told to try the basic troubleshooting steps. I’ve done absolutely everything I can to fault find on my end (I’m a qualified electrician so I’m not stupid) and it is not my equipment or set up that is to blame. I’m sick of clarifying this but I have tried 2 routers, several filters, several cables, I only have one socket which is the master socket and I am plugged into the test socket, as always.

So basically plusnet have me bent over a barrel with a problem they don’t know how to fix or are unwilling to fix, and won’t let me leave without paying a ransom. I’m not really looking forward to another 17 months of unreliable service. I’ve honestly never been so disappointed in any product or service, in fact this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to air my grievances on a public forum. It should be a crime to hold customers in contracts when the supplier is not fulfilling their obligations.

[#4]

As an additional note, the emails I receive from plusnet are flagged with the following message when they arrive in my ProtonMail inbox

“This email has failed its domain’s authentication requirements. It may be spoofed or improperly forwarded”

I don’t really know what the implications of that are but it’s not a good look to have an alert on an email from a company whose bread and butter is internet based services.

[#5]

All fair enough. Makes it much easier since you've done so many diagnostics already.

Looking into a few of those points, not sure on a closed port-maybe an authentication issue but it's not uncommon for engineers to claim the ISP's equipment isnt in correctly, not picking up that plusnet is openreach equipment but without knowing exactly what was wrong I can't say.

As for the line being fine with BT I'd say that if a line is going to fail, it'll be when it's manipulated. Quite possible your port at the cabinet was changed depending on how the line was transferred and you could therefore have been put on a faulty port, or it's not been connected right.

Again, its speculation, but if your router is fully losing sync, that is a line fault regardless, not plusnets systems, so coincidence or not a line fault has developed during the transfer. Moving back to BT, if approached right would take longer anyway, as you'd have the two week standing time before the move at least before they could even start to work and then you'd still get the same engineers.

As for interference, I was thinking wifi initially as your initial post didn't specify details on this, but we can rule wifi congestion out. Line interference is possible, but honestly very unlikely as that would have likely impacted you with BT unless you had very high SNR targets and such like before-I've seen this happen before-rural house, moved provider and REIN then started being a problem. Turned out neighbour was issue, but didn't impact before as the other ISP had ramped the SNR up and had high error correction-dropped the speed but as expected, since it was stable they didn't realise anything was wrong so dont discount the possibility that you may have had an issue before, but masked by DLM settings.

Honest advice here from me though is this-if this fault hasn't had an engineer yet (not the initial fault-that would be classed as seperate) then you want that arranging, and I'd get the engineer checking at the cab-look at a lift and shift since that is a possible change that has occurred. Without the engineer you'll likely get nowhere with contract release.

Get on the phone to them again, and if the tech agent starts asking you to repeat checks again, just ask to speak to management to get it straight to the faults team.

[#6]

That is such useful reply, thank you so much! I really appreciate it.

“as the other ISP had ramped the SNR up and had high error correction-dropped the speed but as expected, since it was stable they didn't realise anything was wrong so dont discount the possibility that you may have had an issue before, but masked by DLM settings.”

This has highlighted something which I had suspected and mentioned a few days ago but wasn’t able to put into accurate words. I do vaguely recall being told by bt years ago that my line wouldn’t support speeds higher than 6mbps without errors. I’m getting an unstable 10-11mbps at the moment so hopefully this info can help get the ball rolling! I would rather be slow and stable to be honest!

Thank you for your help, honestly, you are a hero!

[#7]

Absolutely no problem at all. Get those engineers out to make sure the line is good, and if they're sure it's fine the engineers should be able to contact their centre to get you speed capped to what it can handle-though I'd check if the 6Mb is within the estimate in your contract-if it isn't meeting the minimum but that's the only way its stable then there's your contract argument sown up.

[#8]

I think my minimum estimate was something like 1.2mbps so I would be more than happy with a stable 6. In all honesty, you’ve been so helpful that I now don’t want to pursue getting out of contract and I will be much better able to articulate my problem to tech support and hopefully be able to get this resolved. I really can’t thank you enough for talking me through the potential problems!

I will make a phone call tomorrow and see how it goes from there.

All the best!

[#9 · Accepted solution]

It's the whole point of this community forum. A lot of very tech savvy customers, some very good staff working this, plus no doubt a few staff workers on none staff profiles.

I will say though if your min speed is 1.2, then 11 does seem quite optimistic so it does add up.

Just drop back if there's anything else you need!

[#10]

@Kdog

I’ve just been on the phone to tech support and I managed to accurately articulate what the problem and solution might be, based on what we had discussed. This appears to have fixed the problem and I am now a happy customer with no intent of cancelling.

The person I spoke to on the phone was great as well, very polite, sincere and didn’t ask me to reset my router even once!

Although I did initially have a bad experience, it has all turned around because of your input so thank you. My apologies going out to anyone I whinged at along the way as well!

All the best