Horrific service - no internet for 2 months

[#1]

First off after first signing up with Plus net in December of last year there were no problems at all; no latency or drops.

Until mid May when all of a sudden my connection started dropping out at semi-regular intervals. I would have ~20 to ~35 minutes of up time then ~2 minutes of down time. As the weeks went on it got worse and worse with ~10 minutes of up time and 2 minutes of down time. I wrote an app to take the logs for me so I could leave it running throughout the day, to discover that on some days I was having over 70 disconnects within 24 hours!

In the mean time 3 separate teams of Openreach engineers had come out to inspect the problem and each time reporting there was nothing wrong. They'd show up, test the line, mark it as no problem then leave. Bare in mind I have to take unpaid leave in order to be home for the Openreach engineers to come round.

On the 3rd visit they informed me that my neighbor was also having the same issue and they believed they was REIN interference on the phone lines. They also informed me that they had identified the cause of the issue and were sending an electrician top the problem premises that same week to fix the issue.

I had also raised a complaint with Plusnet which a complaints rep picked up. We negotiated that I would work out yet another day to take off with my boss and to reply to him when a day had been selected. The next day I had a day booked off for later that week and I had send a message to the complaints rep but got no replay and the booked off day came and went. Turns out the accompanist rep had gone away for 4 days in the middle of my case and no one else picked it up...

A week goes by and the issue still persisted so I cancelled my Plusnet account as the service was utterly unusable and I had been using BT Fon while the issue had been ongoing (wracking up a bill of £107.94 as of 2/7/2018 ).

Then last week I phones up Plusnet to see if the issue had been resolved and to my surprise I was informed by the rep that it had in fact been fixed. Now, if you have that conversation recorded you will hear me say over and over 'are you sure'? to which each time the rep responded with "yes".
So what a surprise to see that it in fact has not been fixed at all /s.

I cannot afford to take another unpaid day off work for yet another Openreach team to do nothing but I also cannot afford to keep spending hundreds of pounds on BT Fon.
My last options are the complaint I raised yesterday with Plusnet, to raise an issue with Ofcom/ombudsman and to seek compensation for the days of work lost, BT Fon bill and Plusnet broadband/line rental wasted over this time.
Utterly frustrated with the awful service from Plusnet and Openreach.

[#2]

Moderator's note by Dick (Strat): Post released from Spam Filter.

[#3]

Hi,

A warm welcome to the forums. I really do understand how frustrating issues such as yours can be. REIN (when encountered) is a devil of a problem. Poor quality phone circuits are more prone to such issues than good ones. Whatever, all ISPs are in the hands of BT Openreach for investing such issues - note I say investigate not resolve.

Even if BTOR can identify the source of the REIN they have no powers to force the owner of the source to fix the problem. If there is a REIN issue, then it will remain impacting your phone line ... no matter which ISP you use ... unless (a) the interference is on the e-side circuit and you can upgrade to FTTC or (b) you can switch to virgin media who use their own infrastructure which is technically different to the BT copper pair network.

A staffer on the forum might be able to get an escalation with BTOR but reading between the lines, BTOR might have hit a brick wall in asking the owner of the defective equipment to remedy the issue.

[#4]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I am aware that if it is indeed REIN that the causer doesn't have to comply (but can be escalated though other routes).

But the major part of the complaint/frustration is no one has bothered to tell me if/when it will ever be resolved.
I didn't know that Virgin had its own infrastructure to that extent though, may be worth looking into.

[#5]

Hi Dahlvash,

I'm really sorry to learn of the problems that you've had with your connection of late.

I've taken a look at the account and I've added your connection logs to the account for you (ticket 177902273) as well as some tests. As it stands, a potential fault has been found and seems to have been resolved by Openreach, though your speeds still appear slower than expected. In this case, I've moved the ticket into the social media ticket pool so that we can keep a close eye on it for you.

We will of course look to offer a refund for downtime once the fault has been confirmed as resolved. We, however would not necessarily be able to cover other factors such as BT Fon and time.

[#6]

Communication: An ISP can only report as good and as clearly as the information provided (or not provided) by BTOR engineer written exit reports. If there is a need for follow-up activity, that may or may not be passed back to the ISP.

There’s another bad REIN case elsewhere around here which has been dragging on for weeks with minimal progress reports from BTOR. BTOR eventually got senior engineers on the ground (multiple properties impacted) ... who found an earth leak on a power transformer. Not sure how that one has since progressed.

[#7]

Based on the information I've seen on my tests, I'm dubious that this was ever REIN ... but I could be wrong though. I want to see if the line is stable overnight before we chase again.

[#8]

Thanks for the assistance.
My connection issue is absolutely not resolved contrary to what Openreach say; It drops just as much as before. But I see a comment in the ticket saying its been rejected back to Openreach anyway.

I'll just have to wait some more.

[#9]

Hi Dahlvash

I've just sent a reply to the ticket with regards to how we're able to move things forward with this for you. 

Moderator's note by Dick (Strat): Corrected username.