I have been a Plusnet customer on and off now for well over 10 years and had always been very happy with the level of service and the value for money. I had recommended Plusnet to family members who had also used the service and been happy with it. However my recent experience with a broadband fault has left me very disappointed and I am now very unlikely to stay and even less likely to recommend the service to others.
Our broadband service went faulty in the early hours of Monday morning, my wife contacted me to let me know and I reported the problem to Plusnet. The support engineer went through the usual process, he could see that the service had disconnected in the early hours of Monday morning and a line test showed there was a fault on the line. As is the normal process, he raised the problem with the "supplier", to be precise BT Openreach. He explained it was usual to get an expected fix time of about 48 hours and was a bit surprised to get a response that "it should be done by the following Wednesday. That was up to 10 days without a broadband service!
My first reaction was why will it take that long and that it was not an acceptable time to be left without any broadband service. He said he would try to find out why it was going to take so long.
I fully accept that as I am not a "business" customer, I will not get "instant" responses to problems but I do expect for my service to be restored within 2 or 3 days at most. If for any reason this is not possible then I expect to be given a good reason for this and not just told "that is the date BT Openreach have given us"!
I contacted support again on Tuesday as there had been no update and was again told that they would try and find out what the reasons for the delay were.
By Wednesday morning there was no further information and I was notified that my "issue" had been put on hold until the following Thursday morning!
I immediately added an update, taking it out of hold and expressing my deep concern at the lack of service and information.
By Thursday there was still no update so I raised another question expressing my dissatisfaction with the responses so far and lack of information about why the issue was going to take so long to resolve.
By Friday morning I was ready to make an official complaint if no response had been received, however I got a call from a support engineer who said BT had been in contact with them to tell them the issue had been resolved and that everything should now be working. I explained that as I was not at home I could not do anything to test this and could he contact my wife on our home phone so she could do the various required router resets.
I waited for for 20 minutes or so and called my wife to see if they had got hold of her but she said no.
So I rang her and got her to power off the router, leave it for a few minutes and then power it on again, when that did not seem to work I talked her through connecting her laptop to one of the Ethernet ports on the router. However only one of the Ethernet ports seemed to work and even when she was connected the router would not give her an IP address so we were unable to determine the status of the link. As I was unsure of what to try with the router next, I contacted support again. The support engineer said that we should try to do a factory reset on the device, again I explained that as I was not at home, could he contact my wife to talk her through doing that, he said he would. I immediately texted my wife to tell her and she responded immediately to say she was waiting. The phone call never happened!
So I checked on line and found out how to do a factory reset and contacted my wife to talk her through the process myself. However when attempting to reset the router nothing happened. She tried several times and assured me she could feel the reset button "clicking" when she pressed it, however the power light never changed colour even after over a minute.
I decided to wait until I returned home and try again myself, if that failed I would try and dig out an old router to see if I could get that to work.
When I attempted the reset myself I confirmed that it had no effect, although if I powered the router off and on whilst holding the reset button it did finally make the power button go red. Although the router took several minutes to reset itself, when it came back up again, it did not seem to be any different to before.
So today I contacted support again to explain what we had done and the results, the support engineer said he thought the router was faulty but as it was out of "warranty" it would not be replaced free of charge. We could either pay for a new one or take out another 12 month contract and they would send out a new one free of charge.
I expressed my dismay and also explained that I did not believe that it was a coincidence that the router had stopped working at the very time there was a problem with my line, either due to the line fault or something the engineers had done whilst resolving the issue. He tried to convince me that it was not possible for this to happen, however I have been a network engineer for over 20 years and experience tells me you cannot make any such guarantee.
So now I am left with a reduced service from an old router. We have been planning to take out a fibre service but now have no intention of using Plusnet due to the very poor service. Experience from friends and acquaintances, suggests that many other providers actually send routers out routinely to isolate this as a possible issue.
I do not think it is unreasonable in the age we live in, when we rely so heavily on this type of service to expect to be kept informed about issues and given reasons for delays.
Although support staff were always civil, I feel like I was being fobbed off and that I had no right to expect anything other than what I was given.
I am disappointed that Plusnet have let me down on this occasion and even though it may cost a bit more I will happily go elsewhere to get my fibre broadband service.
