The Neverending Story

[#1]

I signed up to Plusnet Broadband on 1st July 2024 and was told my activation date would be 28th July when my old broadband provider's service would finish.  Several days before I was due to go live I received an email saying that my live date would now be 31 July.   I phoned customer services who said they would try and bring it forward.   Nothing happened.

I phoned again on the 1st and was told it would now take between 7-10 days to activate my broadband,

I patiently waited until yesterday when I got another message telling me my activation date was now the 15th August, I phoned the customer services team again who said this was the earliest an engineer could install.

This morning upon checking the status of my order I saw that 16th August was now allegedly the activation date.

I'm fed up phoning as nothing seems to happen, promises are made and almost immediately changed.  If it is indeed live on the 16th I will have been without broadband for nearly 3 weeks and as I work from home this is not ideal, to put it mildly.

[#2]

Sounds odd - but  - did you tell your old provider (who?) you were moving, what service were you on with them, and what service have you signed up to PN with?

[#3]

Yep, all that was done, the problem seems to be they system they used to activate my order kept cancelling it and each time they had to start again from scratch.

[#4]

Ah - so you told them you were moving - which you shouldn't do, unless it was Virgin or an altnet, as that would cause them to raise a cease on your line, which prevents any other BT-supplied ISP from placing a take-over until the cease clears, and then it is down to engineer availability once the order is successfully placed.

[#5]

What you are saying is what Plusnet told me originally but I had to notify my old provider as my new contract was due to auto-renew with them,  I thought I'd be billed for August if I din't let them know. 

That being said surely it shouldn't take 3 weeks to sort that issue out?

[#6]

No - if you place an order with a new ISP, their take-over request automatically starts the cancellation process of your  old account, but if your transfer is delayed for any reason, the way it works means that your down-time is reduced to the time it takes for OR to complete the actions they need to do. It may mean you get a part-month invoice from your old ISP, but your PN account would not kick in until the switch was complete.

[#7]

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@ForeverWar wrote:

...I had to notify my old provider as my new contract was due to auto-renew with them, 

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Who were you with? Auto renewal of a long contract is most uncommon. Normally when a contract ends you transfer to a rolling higher priced monthly contract unless/until you actually agree to a new longer term deal.

[#8]

It was Origin Broadband, I'm beginning to wish I'd stayed with them.