Moving home, services disconnected a month too soon

[#1]

I can appreciate this, Empirical. I can't confirm or deny if the advisor they spoke to on Friday did mention this or not but it is clearly stated on the ticket. Nevertheless, the order to renumber their line back to their old number has now completed.

[#2]

The adviser simply told me last Friday he would have the line reconnected, there was no mention of the phone number changing. This was only mentioned when I told the adviser that we would be moving away from Plusnet next month, at which point I was asked if I was keeping the number and I said no, as we are moving to Virgin.
We are now getting our broadband back, wait for it, Wednesday the 7th of May. Apparently we have to wait for an engineer visit, heaven knows why and seeing as this whole situation is a blunder on behalf of Plusnet, I'd at least expect it to be fast tracked, which it isn't. We are in luck that a few of our neighbors have BT at home, so we can hook up to BT fon WIFI at £6 per day, nicely putting us out of pocket, and then only one of us could be online at the same time, both my wife and myself tend to use the internet simultaneously, so that would turn into £12 a day. I've been using my mobile phone as a hotspot so far, but my data is not going to last that much longer.
This really is a total shambles, 13 days without our broadband connection due to an error by one of your staff. I'd almost tell you not to bother to reconnect us, if we didn't want our internet back so badly. We're at the tail end of a house purchase and I have emails flying around left right and center I really need to access and reply to in order to get all the loose ends tied up and having to do it all relying on my mobile phone isn't really helping much. As far as I am concerned, this is breach of contract and I shall be updating the complaint I logged accordingly.

[#3]

Hi michaeldendulk,
I'm sorry if the advisor you spoke to didn't explain this to you regarding your number. As I've confirmed previously, you should now have your old number back.
The engineer's visit is required as it's for Fibre and an engineer is required to attend your Local Exchange and cabinet to connect your services. This is manual work that is required, hence why we rely on engineer availability and this was booked in for the earliest availability in your area.
I'm very sorry for the inconvenience caused by all of this and I can understand that it is a stressful time.

[#4]

Would a plain ADSL connection have been quicker and met michaeldendulk's requirement to do all the emails needed to complete the formalities?

[#5]

Linn,
In this day and age, do they REALLY go and physically disconnect these services, rather than just electronically turn them off?  I would expect not!
Given that this all arose out of a PlusNet mistake, is there no "special provisions" route within / through BTw which could have been used to get things put back quicker than they have been?
Things can and do go wrong due to errors (we are all human), in such circumstances there ought to be remedial escalation routes to put things back as they should be much quicker than "business as usual" routes permit.

Kevin

[#6]

jelv,
A standard broadband order would've taken 5 working days to complete so we're looking at roughly the same time frame regardless considering the bank holiday coming up.
Townman,
Yes, when a phone line is ceased and the Fibre service is effectively ceased due to this it means that an engineer physically disconnects the Fibre service. To get the Fibre service re-installed on the line it requires physical work done by an engineer and there's no data on the new line that Fibre was ever active on the line.
Unfortunately there isn't a "special provisions" router that we can go down.

[#7]

I thought expedited orders took less time than that?

[#8]

To update, our internet was finally reconnected around 30 minutes ago, at least that's one promise that has been kept. Our complaint ticket that was opened 25/04 remains unanswered, only a note added that it was being assigned on the 2nd of May.

[#9]

Glad to report Plusnet has admitted all the gross faults that have been made in our case and have offered to credit our bill for £10 and waive all cancellation charges when we move as a goodwill gesture (unfortunately Virgin is the only provider already offering fibre broadband at our new address). At least this gives some hope and means in future we won't automatically dismiss Plusnet as a possible provider.