Hi all,
I'm a long time plus.net (well, actually, force9) customer, and just completed a switch to FTTC (or 'Fibre Optic Broadband' as plus call it). There's some feedback on the whole process I thought I'd share, and there are some parts of the process that I felt weren't ideal. That said, overall, things went pretty smoothly - I'm mostly happy apart from the upstream (more on that below).
1.
http://www.plus.net/fibre-broadband/?source=mainNav - this page has a 'check availabilty' link, which if you're an existing customer ends up directing you to
https://www.plus.net/apps/account/change/2398997/CurrentAccount - that redirection makes no sense at all and leaves you somewhat confused. If you do realise you're meant to click 'change my products', you get to a page where you appear to be meant to infer that fibre is not available to you by the fact that it's not mentioned at all on the page.
2. The "notes for the engineer" box when you order is really too small. I'm fairly certain most of the examples given for what you might want to put into that box end up longer than the available space. It took me about 20+ submissions, and each time you resubmit you have to reselect the appointment time again. A little bit of javascript with a 'character left' count and more immediately pointing out the invalid characters would save a lot of frustration.
3. When it did become available, I was able to order it fine from 'change my products', but you don't get any kind of email confirmation, and the date/time of your appointment isn't recorded anywhere (I even went through all the closed questions/service notices on my account, it wasn't there). The 'change my product' page just says I was on standard ADSL and seemed to offer me the chance to try changing again. I was pretty convinced my order hadn't actually completed properly, and fairly shocked when I did get a call from the openreach engineer.
4. At 1AM on the day the the install was due, I got an email "Your product change is now complete, here are the details" - obviously it wasn't complete, the engineer hadn't even visited at that point!
5. An email when hardware is dispatched might be useful.
6. There's a staggering number of service notices generated - eg. at 6:06pm on 15th, I have one 'This question is confirmation that your Deferred Hardware - Netgear WNR1000 - FTTC contract has now started.', followed by another one at 6:06pm on 15th 'This question is confirmation that your Deferred Hardware - Netgear WNR1000 - FTTC has been nullified.'
7. "This question is confirmation that your Extra Fibre Profit Foregone Contract (18 months) contract has now started." - I have no idea what a 'Profit Foregone contract' is, can anyone englightment me?
8. The fact that I've signed up to an 18 month is also something that really should be confirmed in an email in my opinion.
9. Due to the availably thing on plus.net's site being useless, a quick bit of checking revealed people were being suggested to use
https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/main.html instead, which told me I could expect 32.2Mbps down and 13.3Mbps up - brilliant! So I signup, what do I get upstream - 1.6 Mbps. Not at all impressed. A lot of digging around revealed that I believe my upstream has been capped at 2Mbps (so why I never get better than 1.6Mbps is still a bit of a mystery), but having fairly throughly checked through
http://www.plus.net/fibre-broadband/?source=mainNav http://www.plus.net/fibre-broadband/broadband/
http://www.plus.net/residential/faqs.shtml#fbtop the 'How fast is fibre?' and
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/speed_basics.shtml I don't see this mentioned at all. In fact I'm fairly certain I've been missold this product; it is not the one I was expecting.
10. Even though I request the 30M data extension kit at signup, when the engineer turned up he didn't actually have any on his van. Not a huge issue, he made up a cable with an RJ45 plug on the end instead (and ran it exactly where I wanted, very nice job), but it seems pointless having the box to request this if the information isn't actually getting through.
11.
https://portal.plus.net/my.html?s=0&action=account_summary is utterly bewildering; totting up it looks like I'd have 202.99 to pay if I cancelled. Ouch. (The £40 for the WNR1000 seems particularly cheeky given Maplin & PCWorld (who aren't exactly known for being cheap!) sell them for £30! It also directly contradicts the ticket on my account that says the charge for the WNR1000 has been nullified.)
12.
http://www.plus.net/fibre-broadband/?source=mainNav in the 'here's the legal bit', "Fibre broadband 18-month contract: The Plusnet Fibre service is subject to a minimum period of 18 months. If you leave within 12 months, you may be liable to pay charges relating to the set-up of your service and for hardware we have provided.". To be honest, I really don't understand why there is a mention of both 12 and 18 months - I'm utterly confused about what I might have to pay if I were to cancel.
The process on the installation day was fine though; engineer phone (actually a bit early, which was good) to say he was ready to start and the phone would go dead, phone came back on 15 minutes or so later, engineer turned up and fitted everything. He briefly thought the WNR1000 wasn't suitable, don't think he'd seen one before. I think it took less than 90 minutes from his first call to everything being setup and working.
