Is Plusnets help phone out of order? OR do they have a mountain of faults

[#1]

Phoned up about a neighbors phone that has been out of service since the 11th December and the automated system said up to a 15 minute wait - well its now at 57 minutes and still on hold

[#2]

Just 1 hour wait but fortunately I then got a young lady who quickly grasped the situation and quickly addressed the problem I was asking about which was for an elderly neighbor, who has been waiting for openreach to repair an exchange fault.
She sounded so pleasant I didn't even mention the one hour wait 🙂

[#3]

Sorry for the long wait.
Just for future reference you can test the line online and raise a fault too using the link below.
https://portal.plus.net/my-account/tools/phone-troubleshooter/

[#4]

Not if, when at  testing the line stage, a message comes up "oops, something went wrong" and the fault reporting will not progress any further. Same 'phone fault which was allegedly repaired/bodged by BTOR on the 21st Dec last.
However, I 'phoned CS at 8.33 am this morning and the call was answered immediately. The transfer to someone to get the repair rolling only took about 7 minutes too.

[#5]

That only checks as far as the Stromness exchange as we are then linked by a microwave link and then the local copper network on the island.
It was obvious that it was almost 100% certain that the fault would be on the island following the lightning strike that knocked the phones out and nothing to do with the floods down south which one operator told me was the reason for the delay.
The young lady last night got the ball rolling and this morning I received a text stating that an engineer would hopefully arrive Friday and openreach now saying that the delay was due to problem with the ferries to the island. The mail has been delivered 6 days a week and the kids have been going over daily to school so no problem there.
We did look at transferring two of our phone lines back to BT so as to take advantage of the free incoming calls transfered FOC to mobiles during outages but after spending 30 minutes talking to BT sales call center decided we would leave them with plusnet and look at voip services.
Any advice in which voip service would be the cheapest just to use during phone line outages would be appreciated