Appalling quality of service

[#1]

I placed an order for broadband for my village hall in September.  I chose Plusnet for its advertised good customer service record and the price of the service.  To say that it has been a complete disaster is an understatement.  After placing the order I was informed that I needed to may a survey fee to Open reach of over £300 which to a charity is a lot of money.  The payment  ran into difficulties because I had wrongly entered the  payment details into the  link that the agent  had sent me rather than via my phone.  very poorly explained and may have been due to a poor line.  I then had to wait whilst a pending bank payment timed out before phoning  and paying by card.  The order then was cancelled by Plusnet but  I managed to get it re-instated.  But, here we are now into November and still no broadband service.  I get frequent updates from Plusnet which tell me that it's a supplier issue and that they will up date me soon. but that is all.    My next expected call with Plusnet is later  this week and I just hope that they have some progress to offer or I will have little choice but to cancel my order and ask for a refund.  It is so frustrating and when you couple this with call waiting times of at least half an hour every call it really makes me wonder what on earth is going on at Plusnet and  to question how they can still keep  stating "Multi award-winning broadband with very happy customers." with such a poor standard of service.

[#2]

Moderators Note

This topic has been moved from Broadband to My Orders

[#3]

My sympathies, it must be very frustrating and maybe Plusnet can pull some extra strings. But please be aware that Openreach is responsible to nobody and you will encounter the same problem with any ISP. Of course individual customers cannot contact Openreach, all requests must go through your ISP. The series of strikes by OR workers last month does not help.

You might be better using a 5g service if the signal has reached your area yet?

[#4]

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@RVH wrote:

I placed an order for broadband for my village hall in September.

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That in a nutshell explains everything!

A Village Hall is what BT Openreach call a Not Served Premises (NSP) - see BT Price List

Under its current regulatory obligation, BT is not obliged to provide telephony service to locations which are not for normal business or dwelling purposes (i.e. Non Served Premises).

A NSP has a mandatory survey requirement ... and from personal experience these are not handled well by BT Openreach.  All that an ISP can do is raise the survey request and wait.  Mine took over 3 months and it was a not through lack of effort by Plusnet.  I found it helped to complain direct to the CEO of BT Group and BT Openreach which stopped BT OR trying to fib off Plusnet ... instead BTOR provided better responses, but unfortunately, they were just lies!

You will face the exact same issues no matter who you chose to be your ISP.  This is not about Plusnet's approach to service, but rather the combination of there being no regulatory obligation to provide a telephony service and no urgency to do anything.

The applicable charges (from BTOR to the ISP) can be found here - BT Price List - which as you can see are more than the price you mentioned.

Your situation could be even more complex if the location is in a PTSN / xDSL stop sell / install area as the nation approaches the switch off of the PTSN network and a progressive migration to optical fibre FTTP.