Fibre orders

[#1]

A couple of feedback points learned from my ongoing fttc order, since I'm not sure that the points have been picked up and forwarded to relevant people in order to improve your systems when I've been speaking to staff. I do appreciate that fibre is a relatively new product.
1) BT Retail aggressively marketed to our exchange area about the fibre enablement, for months before the exchange was enabled, and they also promoted and accepted pre-orders. Of the many friends and acquaintances around the village I've spoken to, I appear to be the only one who did not order from BT Retail. I reckon with their aggressive approach (including inferring that they were the only company who you can order with, when I think they were talking about pre-orders, but it was ambiguously put), they must have captured at least 90% of the many fttc orders for this exchange (and it seems more like 99%).
2) I held off on ordering Plusnet Home Phone so that I could place Phone and Fibre together, thinking that would make things simpler, when the opposite turns out to be the case. Not only is there nothing that I can find on the sales website or ordering process to tell you about this, but the provisioning team appear to assume that the customer knows this (see 53591552 and 53591451 ).
I'm otherwise very happy with Plusnet overall, but it's frustrating to find that everyone else who ordered at the same time will have been provisioned weeks earlier! (I placed my order on launch day for this exchange).
Hope that helps!

[#2]

Hi there,
Thanks very much for that, it's very useful feedback - and I'm sorry it's led to the confusion that it has. I hope things are getting sorted and that everything's on the way for you, please let us know if there's anything we can chase.
I'll make sure this thread is marked for internal attention so we can learn from it, and will see what we can do about getting a bit more information onto the fibre upgrade journey especially where home phone is concerned. For the record, I believe we can arrange a simultaneous provide of both phone and fibre if a new phone line is to be installed but unfortunately not in other circumstances.
I hope we manage to impress more from this point, and thanks very much for the above.

[#3]

I'm sure it'll be fine.
Thanks Matt!

[#4]

Quote from: between1and16cha

1) BT Retail aggressively marketed to our exchange area about the fibre enablement, for months before the exchange was enabled, and they also promoted and accepted pre-orders. Of the many friends and acquaintances around the village I've spoken to, I appear to be the only one who did not order from BT Retail. I reckon with their aggressive approach (including inferring that they were the only company who you can order with, when I think they were talking about pre-orders, but it was ambiguously put), they must have captured at least 90% of the many fttc orders for this exchange (and it seems more like 99%).

BT's marketing is pretty smart - if you check it carefully it says that you can only get Infinity from BT which is true as that is their name for fibre. They don't say you can only get fibre broadband from BT.

[#5]

The engineer was in this morning, right on schedule.
My member centre page currently says;
https://portal.plus.net/my.html?action=data_transfer_speed

Quote

Estimated line speed:    1.0Mb (Accurate to within +/- 1Mbit) - Checked on 2012-04-09 11:56:06 Current line speed:    37 Mb

which is nice. Very happy; thanks Plusnet!  
Especially since the engineer says that the cabinet is nearing capacity, and a second one is planned next to it. Apparently some areas elsewhere have quite low uptake of fibre, but this rural area with long lines and often 256k DSL speeds is showing a dramatic uptake.

[#6]

Quote from: between1and16cha

Especially since the engineer says that the cabinet is nearing capacity, and a second one is planned next to it. Apparently some areas elsewhere have quite low uptake of fibre, but this rural area with long lines and often 256k DSL speeds is showing a dramatic uptake.

...and thats the crazy thing about the economics of it all - BTO seem to be putting in maximum effort in areas served already by ADSL2+/LLU/Virgin cable -where there will be automatically  lower levels of take up....and totally ignoring areas stuck on the last century technology of ADSL or even dial up..... I live in a relatively prosperous area where I suspect the % take up would be high, but we are served by an exchange of only ~ 1600 lines.

[#7]

I suspect that's because they're wanting to offer an equivalent service to those providers in those areas, as they'll be the main reason for loss of customers.

[#8]

The best (only?) way to get BT to do anything is to start a very public campaign to get enough people on-board to go to an alternative solution such as a community wireless project.

[#9]

A group within our community did that - raised the money to install and run our own community fibre link, and at the same time our MP had started making noises about 'minimum service' requirements (they were visibly squirming at the meeting where that was mentioned), then race to infinity happened, and we got tacked onto the list of winners. Then they pledged to make sure that 99%+ of properties would have fibre available, (which they do appear to be honouring), and the community project plans were duly dropped.
At the same time, although I've no doubt that it helped, it may not have entirely been the community campaign; they do appear to have shifted in their overall policy, with similar plans for the surrounding rural areas now being announced.