Terrible experience for a new joiner on PN

[#1]

Hi All,
I switched to Plus Net from Sky on the 21st of January and the last 2 and bit weeks have been one of the worst experiences I have ever had with broadband since I started using it. I came to know through my friends that PN are offering fiber optic broadband trials in the Milton Keynes area and I thought I will become part of it too so I decided to switch. Before switching I thought I will double check with PN whether I would be eligible for the trial or not. Before confirming my order I checked with their sales agent and they said I would be eligible for the trial so I signed up. However, after a couple of days I got a message from the support team that the cabinet in my area is not going to be active till 31st of March so I will not be able to get on the trial since the registration for the trials is going to close on the 26th of January. However, they did assure me that if I get in touch with them around 31st of March they may be able to put me on the trial. I thought it might be worth the wait so let them setup the broadband and I will get on the trial when the cabinet is active in my area.
PN sent me the Thomson v8 router since I decided to take the contract for £4.99 (P&P charges) and I tried to set it up on the day the switch took place. To my horror I found that one of my laptops would not connect to the router and the other one did connect but after you restart it , it would not connect. Both my laptops have got Windows Vista and one is slightly older and it would not connect by default. Then started the round of calls to PN technical team to resolve this router issue, they tried to help to the best of their ability and tried a lot of things like changing the channel settings, security settings etc. but nothing would resolve the problem. They even sent me a second router since anything they changed was not working with the first one but the same problems persisted with the second router. I had to restart the router everytime I wanted to connect my laptop wirelessly and that had an adverse impact on my broadband speed which I was not aware of till one of the technical team members told me. By Friday last week when I called them up in the evening they pretty much said we have done whatever we could do and we can not help you further so you can either get your own router or if you want you can disconnect from PN since your problems are not getting resolved. I called up the customer services after my call with the technical team to ask them to disconnect and they said I need to contact the cancellations team who are open only from 9:00-17:30 Mondays to Fridays and they were closed at that time of the day. I tried raising a ticket on the help assistant but could not since there were already more than 3 open tickets that were logged for every call I made and no one from the support team would close them.
I thought during the weekend I can try to do something to make this work since I do not want to cancel because of the initial bad experience so I posted a query on the community site. I got a response from one of the members that I should upgrade the firmware on the Thomson router and that should resolve the connectivity issues. I wondered why was this not suggested by any of the technical team members but anyways I went ahead and upgraded the firmware on Saturday ( which did resolve the issue with one of the laptops but the old laptop still had the same connectivity problem. I posted my updates on the forum and the members were very helpful to provide suggestions but nothing would work. Till Saturday night I had one laptop working perfectly fine with the upgraded firmware and I was getting around 2.5Mbps speed on my line where the maximum speed I can get is 3Mbps and I thought this is due to the frequent restarting of the router and should recover once I solve the connection problems. On Sunday morning I thought I will try to flash the firmware of my old Netgear router that Sky had provided and try to connect that and to my horror I noticed that the broadband speed had dropped to a terrible 400kbps and I did not have a clue what had happened there, was it the firmware of something on the PN side that was causing this issue. I spent a lot of time to flash my old router and finally by evening I managed to make it work with PN but the speed issue was still there so I tried to call PN and I could not get through, I waited for about half an hour on the call but it did not go through so I gave up and disconnected. Today the speed is around 1.5Mbps and I called up PN support and they said there was some problem in their systems yesterday which caused the speed to drop and if I restart my router it should pick up a higher speed but it still is 1.5Mbps after restarting.
After all this hassle and wasted time I have gone back to using my old router. The new Thomson routers are packed in the box. The issue I have got is with the opening hours of the cancellation team, I would have to take time off work to be able to call them and don't know how long I would be on the call before I can get it cancelled. The community site is great but the broadband service and equipment I have received so far from PN is terrible. I do not want to disconnect and would really like to try PN but with the contract and the limited opening hours of the cancellation team I think I have not other option but to take some time off work and get this disconnected and go back to Sky since I never had any problems with them in the 5 years I had broadband from them and over the period of 12 months they work out cheaper as well. I thought I would share my experience with other people on PN and would like them to comment if they faced similar experience with PN.
Thanks.

[#2]

With regards to the trial I'm sorry about any confusion there, for the benefit of others I would always recommend using the checkers and FAQ on http://trials.plus.net before getting stuck into this.
With regards to the router issues you mention I can see that Jojo is doing a good job of helping you out here: http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,92497.msg781019.html#msg781019 By the sounds of things you just need to follow her advice and download this on to your other laptops: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us Also as you've been dealing with Jojo so far re that problem I'm going to advise that you keep in touch with her rather than getting myself or any of the other staff involved in that issue.
I'm sorry too if you've found it difficult to deal with support about this issue and I'd like to assure you that feedback will be given but I'm confident that we have found you a solution to the issues you mentioned. Give Jojo's advice a try but do let us know if you still have any difficulties with this.

[#3]

Hi Adam,
Thanks for your reply. Probably, it was my mistake that I did not check for the FTTC trials details correctly before placing the order and just trusted what the sales team said. If I had been more careful I would not be regretting my decision to move.  
As for the router issue I had already performed the steps that Jo proposed last week but it did not work so in the end I had to start using my old Netgear router that Sky had provided to me by flashing it with the latest version of the firmware and it works perfectly. The router that PlusNet provided is not being used and is packed in the box it came in. I do not intend to use it since it does not work with all my laptops. The issue I am facing now is the very slow broadband speed, my line can support upto 3 Mbps but I am getting only 1.5 Mbps as of today and am not sure whether I will ever get the maximum speed my line supports or not.  Hence, I am sceptical on how I would keep up with this service which is more expensive than Sky and is not as good as Sky. If I had known that Thomson router would not work with my laptops I would have probably gone with the contract free option rather than taking the contract. Ideally, I would like to stay on and hope the service will be good based on what my friends have experienced so far with Plus Net. But if the service does not improve then I would be stuck in the contract and be getting frustrated every day so it might be better I cancel it now rather than being stuck with it. What do you think.
Thanks.

[#4]

Hi hkalra,
I'm confident we can get your issues sorted, I'll alert Jojo to your reply here and she'll continue to help you through this.