I've had a pretty awful experience from Plusnet's provisioning department completely failing to follow through on anything without my having to repeatedly phone them, and correct their mistakes.
On Wed 13th March Openreach completed a FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) installation and installed the modem and splitter faceplate at my home.
Seven days later on Wed 20th March, around 3pm, both my phone line and FTTC connection were disconnected. I immediately notified BT of a fault on my line. On the morning of Thursday 21st of March an engineer was sent, and reported to me that the line had been deliberately disconnected from the pole and cabinet, and that the Plusnet fibre routing had been removed from the cabinet. While he restored my phone service, he was unwilling to restore the fibre routing as he did not have the correct equipment or work order to do so.
I called Plusnet and reported the fault, and that the equipment had been removed from the cabinet. This was passed onto provisioning, who did nothing because Openreach told them that Fibre had never been installed, and they were going to arrange a new appointment (and presumably a missed appointment charge). I was not informed of this, and was still expecting an engineer to be sent as soon as possible.
On Friday, I started calling Plusnet again through the day repeatedly explaining that the fibre had been installed. I discovered from them that Openreach were claiming the installation had not occurred, I tried to get them to escalate and correct this, but it took till 4pm till this happened. At that point provisioning told me that "as soon as the Openreach ticket is cleared, service will be restored". I tried to explain that unless Openreach replace the equipment for fibre routing in the cabinet, it wasn't possible for my service to be restored. However I was told that "Openreach have conducted line tests and it is working".
Shortly after, (via a 3g mobile) I used Plusnet's own line test, and it produced "Failure of Circuit Check", which was consistent with the Openreach modem not showing DSL sync. It was not till just before 5pm that I finally convinced Plusnet provisioning that there was still a physical disconnection on the line that required an engineer to replace the routing in the cabinet. At this point I reluctantly accepted that they weren't going to get an engineer out to fix this before the weekend.
Reconnecting an accidentally disconnected fibre routing in the cabinet should not take longer than 48 hours, let alone what now looks to be five or more days. I do feel that either Plusnet or Openreach should accept the overtime costs for fixing their own errors, rather than leave me without service over the weekend.
Plusnet's Provisioning department should be verifying what Openreach tell them if it doesn't make sense or contradicts what the end user says has occurred. And that they should use Plusnet's own line and equipment test procedure rather than accept Openreach's word that 'the line is fine now'. It should have raised immediate alarm bells that Openreach were in error when they claimed they had not installed fibre routing for an account that had been active and in use for seven days!
I should not have had to have to take photos of the Openreach installed equipment at my end to prove that Openreach had really completed the install. It should not have been my responsibility to explain that I couldn't have been using an activated fibre account if it hadn't been installed. I should not have had to explain that a fibre link that's been physically disconnected needs to be physically reconnected before it will start working.
I am considering my options for demanding compensation from Plusnet, Openreach or both, and if I want to continue being a Plusnet customer.
