Well, I've always rated Plusnet as: very good, for many years now and I have never hesitated to recommend them.
Sadly, times have certainly changed!
This week, I moved away from the trusted FTTC connection (50 down & 20 up) I had with Plusnet for about 15 trouble free years.
Their support now seems dire and so absolutely unhelpful.
Long gone are the days when the support received used to be a pleasant experience.
Let me explain the situation:
We (my wife & I) had FTTC & telephone line with Plusnet, to our domestic property in the East of England.
We also had a mobile phone each through GiffGaff (O2)
Over the last couple of years the O2 signal has been getting steadily worse to the state where we have to sometimes tilt our heads and stand in certain places in our house to try and not let the call signal be lost.
My missus kept on at me to change her sim to EE (because apparently everyone on EE gets a good signal in & around our house/village) or so she says!
Anyway, I’ve avoided EE like the plague, because whenever I’ve had to assist anyone (at work) with their home broadband, and it’s on EE, I can pretty much guarantee I’ll end up dealing with a nightmare trying to liaise with EE support, and that’s been the case for many years. A bit like trying to deal with Virgin Media & VPN’s.
Anyway, I called Plusnet to ask about joining EE through them, because as I’ve already said, Plusnet support had been good (for years) up until this month!
So, whilst on the phone, their sales guy ‘pulled a blinder’, and I was hooked (suckered more like). During the friendly conversation I was all ready to sign my life away, and I did.
I signed up for everything.
As I told the guy on the phone, I didn’t ‘need’ 900Mbps but after that sales pitch, I ‘WANTED’ 900 Mbps
The new setup was installed yesterday morning (Wednesday), after a couple of weeks wait.
The physical installation went well and was complete in less than 2 hours. The only ‘issue’ was the installation guy hit his finger with his hammer and sent his full mug of coffee flying. But that was quickly cleaned up and another replacement hot cup of coffee was soon on its way back to him.
When the guy left, I had internet connectivity (but only 200Mbps) on the new connection as well as the old (50Mbps) connection (and a working landline telephone).
On Monday this week (two days prior to all this) I’d got the PUK codes for the mobiles and put that in motion on Monday. After doing this, I then learned that it was going to take up to 48 hours to ‘port’ the mobile numbers over.
Yes, I could have timed that specific changeover a little better (with hind sight), but when I started that, I thought that was only going to take a few hours.
So, I found out on the same day as my internet changeover, that I could ‘possibly’ get one bar of signal (intermittently) on our mobile phones if I was to stand on one leg (tip toe) with the phone in my right hand, to my right ear (it didn’t work on the left) and also remained as still as a statue. Needless to say, any conversation (if it ever connected) would last just a few seconds.
I decided to ask Google for possible solutions, and the results came back to try wifi calling. I had looked into wifi calling (and constantly asked GiffGaff about it)but it was never available for GiffGaff, which is why it didn’t think about it at first for EE, but good news, it was available for us and our phones were compatible (Samsung Galaxy S8 & S9). I don’t ‘do’ Apple excrement, that’s for people who love ‘bling’ and have plenty of money to throw away (Video editing is an exception to the rule though).
I didn’t set up the wifi calling until today though (Which seems to work OK).
Back to the Broadband.
***Making a support call*** This support call was to do with the slow speed. (I only get 200Mbps) (Minimum should be 500Mbps) What a nightmare! You have to first liaise with an AI bot and probably (at least in my case) not have an option that fits your support query. So you waste your time going through that, then you have to text support (If you can get a flaming signal on your phone!).
Calling them from my landline was no longer an option, because it was then, that I found out that they had taken my landline away!!! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr
I recon the landline went when the old internet stopped (a couple of hours after the installation guy left)
Anyway, Back to texting…. After texting, they (the bot) texted back a couple of times, then you have to respond again (via text) then you have to wait again, then maybe they will call you, then you have to go all through the security checks, then you have to spend the next 5 to 10 minutes explaining the whole issue, then they ask you to wait whilst they do some checks. That’s when they will likely drop the call, so you have to go through all that AGAIN!
When you’ve spent about an hour getting absolutely nowhere, if you are optimistic like me, you’ll ‘hope’ they are doing something behind the scenes, fixing the problem, so you’ll check every 5 to 10 minutes to see if the issue has been fixed.
Not a chance! So you spend another 1 – 2 hours attempting another support call, again, having to go through all the security and explaining the whole situation AGAIN, because it’s a different support person.
You might be lucky though and get to stay on the line for the whole of the call. Not me though. I told the guy I was using a mobile phone on wifi connect, but that didn’t stop him resetting my broadband from his end (obviously cutting me off) and then to insult me even further, emailing me from a ‘DoNotReply’ email address, to say he tried to call me back straight away…. Seriously???? Obviously the system didn’t have time to reconnect itself.
So, we start again…. Text / talk to robot / text again for call back / eventually get a call back from ANOTHER person. Go through all the security, explain the issues so far. They start to investigate and do everything all the other support people have already done 6 times!
Oh, and don’t forget to keep an eye on the time. After about 19:30 hours, you can forget about them responding to you. It isn’t going to happen.
What WOULD be helpful is an email support option, where you can explain the situation ONCE, and all the support people you eventually have to talk with can read it and be up-to-speed in no time, but I don’t think that option will be available any time soon, because it will actually be helpful! And you get to keep a copy of each communication which will undoubtable show their incompetence. So, forget that.
The last communication I had was with a support person with a female voice (who was helpful and I’m hopeful she will continue the support tomorrow and maybe we’ll get somewhere)
I’ll update if/when I get any further.
Re-cap before I go:
I had:
50Mb broadband
Landline telephone
2 mobiles (on GiffGaff) with not brilliant signal
I’ve currently got:
200Mbps broadband (Ordered & Paying for 900Mbps)
No landline
2 mobiles with no signal but able to use wifi calling
