Awful and Non Existent Customer Service & Fault Reporting

[#1]

I have been using Plusnet, and Force9 before that, for more years than I care to remember. Historically they have been very quick to deal with enquiries by phone or emails. Not just responding, but sorting things out. Doing me proud, to quote their advertising. I have always laughed at other people tales of problems with other providers.

All that has changed.

Recently I have been suffering broadband drop outs and slow data. The phone line is sometimes noisy.

I know the reason. It is the last 50M or so of cable from a telephone pole to my front door. The cable duct is waterlogged. Some time back BT/Openreach measured speed at the pole, and at my front door.Yes all the 1s and 0s are drowning! Their last fix was to use spare cores in the cable. But the problem has eventually returned.

I can't email customer services - Plusnet don't give me the option. They don't answer the phone. By that I mean you have to wait so long that the battery in your cordless phone goes flat, or you lose circulation in the hand holding the phone.

Last time I did get through, Plusnet said they would raise a ticket and it would be dealt with in a few days. That was a few weeks ago.

Does anyone know a time of day when they answer in a reasonable time? Does anyone know a way of getting through to them? Other than a recorded delivery letter to their office or hammering on their door?

Should I cancel my direct debit and wait for them to get in touch? Then again I know their common sense in Pusnet accounts department is very lacking. This is from experience handling the affairs of a deceased customer. They said the customer had not answered his emails so passed the debt to a collection agency, who tried to impose a £50 charge. There were some red faces at Plusnet when I told them what they could do. Needless to say, the costs were written off.

Any suggestions from members? Fortunately I am able to log in and collect emails elsewhere!

[#2]

Raise a fault online at http://faults.plus.net

Once raised you can monitor progress at https://www.plus.net/wizard/?p=search

[#3]

Hi there,

I've just tested your line and it's found a fault external to your premises. I've passed that on to Openreach to investigate and we expect an update by 02/11/16 23:59:59

[#4]

Thank you Chris for your intervention. BT spent the best part of two days fault finding, eventually working out there was a cable fault under concrete not far from my front door. Their digging team was summoned. I ended up with a buried terminal chamber under gravel. This should prove useful in any future fault finding. However, they also disturbed a gas pipe and dug up the lawn to change cable routing to the house.

After all of this (that went on for a couple of months) things did seem better. However, I am again seeing drop outs and slow connection. Broadband speed checker gives ping times to 5 seconds! The Plusnet speed checker failed to run earlier today.

I have no idea whether the remaining BT cable has other faults, or whether there is a contention ratio problem at the exchange. I have no idea who would give me a trustworthy answer to these questions. If I spend on fibre broadband, I still have the almost 100M of potentially dodgy copper to the house and a bigger monthly bill.

In the absence of open and honest information from Plusnet and/or BT, a 4G data SIM sounds very attractive.

[#5]

You could look at the ADSL stats and logs from your modem/router. If the ADSL link itself is dropping out, then that won't be anything to do with contention at the exchange.

[#6]

Hello @DavidValentine

Sorry to hear you're having issues with your broadband again. I can see your connection has become pretty unstable again:

Not picking up any issues on a status check,

	Upstream DSL Link Information	Downstream DSL Link Information
Loop Loss:	28.0	47.0
SNR Margin:	13.3	9.0
Errored Seconds:	1	8
HEC Errors:	0
Cell Count:	1841	3039
Speed:	480	4640

I've run a copper line test as well, and that's come back clear.

My best advice would be to run through the checks at http://faults.plus.net where you can complete the process to raise a fault to us if you need to.