PlusNet broadband problems
I bought a monthly contract from PlusNet online and my ADSL line was finally activated on 15 August. On the 17th August the internet promptly failed and after spending an hour trying to connect without any success, I realised that there was no way I would be using my broadband connection to work from home that day and rushed off to work (luckily, this time the failure was fixed in a couple of hours). The following Monday, which is 21st of August, the broadband died again and it has never worked since. Instead of enjoying a PlusNet broadband service, I have been forced to sit on their customer service help line, (which is frankly useless without an Internet connection as all it does is direct you to their online trouble-shooter) and spent lots of time and energy on sorting out the broadband service problem...
I was told that the cause of the problem was BT lines fault and PlusNet had raised the fault to BT. I called BT help line and BT refused to help me as BT only deals with this sort of problem directly with broadband providers.
In desperation, my husband finally persuaded an operator to send an engineer from BT to look at the problem. I then spent a whole afternoon off work waiting for the engineer - who never turned up.
As there is no way to speak to anyone from the PlusNet support team (as I am only ever directed to leave a message), I rang the PlusNet sales line and was told that they did not know how long it would take for the problem to be fixed.
The Internet is a vital part of my daily work and I cannot afford to wait any longer. Seeing the hopeless situation, I asked for a cancellation of my account and a full refund as I am paying for a service I am unable to use. Instead of releasing me from an unusable service, PlusNet demands further 72.00 for line activation and hardware fee, they have refused to give me a migration code or disconnect me and so I am unable move to any other ADSL service.
Apart from calling NTL to install a cable broadband, do I have any other options? I rang OFCOM for help but all the specialist adviser I talked to suggested I do was to wait for PlusNet to fix my problem which I simply cannot afford to do.
It does not sound quite right to me. Is there not any industry regulatory body to protect consumers from such unsatisfactory and virtually non-existent services?
By: Mrs Qian
Comments from visitors
That plusnet are aq joke i have been off line for 4-5 days now ,its a BT fault is all they say if its not sorted sooner than later "The Judge" from the Sunday mail is the one i am contacting next so be warned
+1
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Managed to get Plusnet to send out a BT engineer. Nothing resolved. Now Plusnet are just ignoring me. I cannot believe how poor the service is! I've been with a number of Broadband providers over the years, but Plusnet is proving to be the absolute worst. I shall never trust again the statement 'award winning Broadband'; it is completely meaningless. Plusnet are the same, indeed worse, load of old rubbish as the rest of them. Avoid them like the plague. Terrible!
-1
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miserablemoaninggit - 16-Dec-11 17:07
Speed now dropped to 1.3mbps, takes ages to get through to customer service on the phone, not much hope when I do. Since joining about 6 weeks or so ago, there has been little stability, slow speeds and very poor customer service - disinterest, the same pre-prepared stock answers you would expect from overseas call centres, not Yorkshire. The only real option they are presenting me with is to pay out £90 to get out of the contract with them, which makes my blood boil. Be warned The Weekly Gripe readers, stay away from Plusnet if you are thinking of changing Broadband suppliers - that advertisement emphasising its base in Yorkshire etc is misleading.
They are certainly no better, and in my experience they are far worse, than the rest of them!
They are certainly no better, and in my experience they are far worse, than the rest of them!
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miserablemoaninggit - 5-Dec-11 19:22
Thanks Plusnet for the slowest speed I've ever had with my broadband line! Slow and unreliable and useless for gaming.
+4
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ihateemsomuch - 1-Dec-11 18:21
I'm still astonished at how poor Plusnet is. The speed has dropped yet again - almost certainly because of their use of the BT network equipment. There needs to be an easier way to get out of these lengthy contracts when providers fail to give the service promised, especially when it was confirmed that the service would be at the same standard as that received by a previous Broadband provider, in this case Virgin. Be warned, be very careful before joining Plusnet - they are not what they make out to be!
+5
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miserablemoaninggit - 28-Nov-11 20:38
plusnet use the BT network and their equipment and a lot of it is rubbish. They're just BT under another name and I know 2 people who left them as soon as they could. It takes ages to get through to customer service and even then they aren't much better than those Indian call centres.
+2
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ex plusnet member thank god - 26-Nov-11 09:41
Plusnet are clearly slowly sliding into the same stagnant pool of inefficiency, inflexibility, poor customer service and general malaise that seems to be the plight of all providers of Broadband and/or telephone services. Basically, they've become victims of their own success - a Yorkshire-based company is the claim but the reality is that BT have bought them out, so Plusnet is essentially BT, that huge monolith of a company that is the blight of so many people's lives. Plusnet? Plusnot!
+1
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miserablemoaninggit - 23-Nov-11 08:42
Plusnet have turned off all websites held on the cgi server so all websites using this service are now showing a 404 error and will be dropped from search engines such as google. They should have ensured that a 503 error was returned while the server was down to insure listling in google were maintained. Their portal says the outage would be for 2 hours, it's been at least 7 hours now and my three sites are still down. I am a business customer and when I phoned and asked why business customers were NOT informed of the planned outage via email all I could get from the Customer Support Guy (thats a joke in itself) was it was posted on the portal, do they realy think business customers have time to continualy look at that, whats wrong with just emailing them.
+3
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angry plusnet customer - 22-Nov-11 19:00
I've been with them for about a month now and it has been somewhat mixed. The usual problems with Customer Service using pre-written, 'stock' messages to response to very specific queries, thereby not actually answering the question. Also, trying to speak with the 'low-level' customer service operatives who are not particularly intelligent, who then have to contact 'supervisors' who also are not particularly intelligent, and then hitting a metaphorical brick wall. As with many companies, it is the minority of very good customer service representatives who manage to keep things - eventually! - afloat by shunning the non-specific responses and actually 'listening' to what the customer has to say. I'll see how it goes for now but I may well regret moving to Plusnet. However, what real alternative is there? We end up moving from one rubbish company to another, paying out hard-earned money for a service that is much less than that promised - a bit like a change of government; rubbish, followed by rubbish, followed by more rubbish, none of them actually 'listening' to the electorate because, as former public school boys, they know what is best!
+3
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miserablemoaninggit - 31-Oct-11 17:34
I've been with them for a year, we've been through 3 routers, some technical problems, a few billing mistakes and a horrible costumer service relationship. It's felt like a bad marriage so I have payed £85 to get rid of them and feels like freedom. Sadly but true, I thank goodness I've had the extra cash, I could have buy myself something nice but to see me free from them is worth it!
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PLUSNET broadband are a company I would never deal with! I signed up for a package online. Their rubbush system insisted on asking for a MAC code. I do not need one. I emailed them twice to tell them it was not required. a week went by. nothing two weeks and I keep getting text messages (to which you can't reply) telling me I am on hold waiting for a MAC code.
I phoned them. waited for 5 minutes then I am re-directed to customer services. No reply after many minutes. This is just their sales! God knows what it must be like to actually use their service. No doubt the directors are pleased with themselves and pay bonuses to themselves. Shareholders please note.
I phoned them. waited for 5 minutes then I am re-directed to customer services. No reply after many minutes. This is just their sales! God knows what it must be like to actually use their service. No doubt the directors are pleased with themselves and pay bonuses to themselves. Shareholders please note.
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We have been with plusnet for just under 6 months and it was great at first with nice speeds,but then we moved house and took plusnet with us.
As soon as the line was activated i noticed drop out speeds from 5gb to 48kbs i rang them up and they were quick to pronounce the modem was faulty and sent the new modem to my Previous address,i mean how stupid was that i transfered the line to my new house with them for gods sake.They also said it was B.T's fault at exchange for over crowding it so they got B.T to investigate the problem but there is no problem according to them.So i requested an engineer to come look at my line but instead of doing this they are saying its my wireless connection,but this is totally rubbish as i use it hard wired with ethernet cable. I just wished i had of left my line at old house and gone with cable.
As soon as the line was activated i noticed drop out speeds from 5gb to 48kbs i rang them up and they were quick to pronounce the modem was faulty and sent the new modem to my Previous address,i mean how stupid was that i transfered the line to my new house with them for gods sake.They also said it was B.T's fault at exchange for over crowding it so they got B.T to investigate the problem but there is no problem according to them.So i requested an engineer to come look at my line but instead of doing this they are saying its my wireless connection,but this is totally rubbish as i use it hard wired with ethernet cable. I just wished i had of left my line at old house and gone with cable.
+2
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We have been with plusnet for nearly three years now, and up until this year have had no problems. This year we suffered the dropped connection fault that a number of people have mentioned - the router would connect for a maximum of two minutes, then drop, then log in, then drop..... we were told it was a faulty router, but we had tried three different ones, AND double-checked one of those on our neighbour's ISP and it worked fine. Plusnet then sent out a new self-authenticating router and that seemed to sort the problem, so we hypothesized that plusnet's software was looking for some form of self-authentication on login (or something...). However, 6 weeks after installation of the new router and a rock steady connection, the same thing has happened again. Plusnet report that a BT engineer has jiggled the line card at the exchange and that does seem to have done the trick for now, but if it happens again, we'll be walking.
-2
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Plusnet was so bad I paid £50 to get out of my contract, they then confirmed I had a months service left but cut off my broadband and told me they would only let me have dial up for the last month. Customer service by email simply sends auto resposes out telling you to read the faqs and closes the complaint ticket as 'completed'.
Paying the £50 to get out was well worth it.
Paying the £50 to get out was well worth it.
+1
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I am a Plusnet option 3 business customer, I am having the same problem with Plusnet at the moment myself. I have been waiting for Plusnet for 3 weeks now to fix my broadband fault. They always seam to place the blame on BT, and I hate it when they do that. They also blame my hardware which is less than 6 weeks old (recently upgraded to high end Cisco hardware). So 3 weeks into the fault ticket they have sent a BT Openreach PSTN (phone engineer) and they say that they have sent a BT broadband faults engineer to the exchange to change a possible faulty line card, and upgrade me to ADSL2+. So since this engineer has visited the exchange, I went from having a really crap connection to having nothing at all. The strange thing is tho when I log into my router I see a Sync speed of 888888Kbps up and 4577000Kbps down, so thats not right ether. Again I made a number of calls, where I was told because of the easter holidays I would have to go without my internet (which my business relys on) until the faults team return on Tuesday morning. I am really fed up and to add insult to injury they said to me if I pay an extra £9 (12 months contract) per month I can get BT's 3 to 4 hour fault responce time. I am not going to pay Plusnet another dime until they fix the concurrent issues on my service.
-1
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if you would like to have a good old rant and have plusnet try and dig themselves out a very BIG! hole then please come and post your comments on the blog website opened just for customers to come and complain http://ihateplusnet.blog.co.uk
-1
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ihateplusnet - 22-Apr-11 00:00
I am a Plusnet option 3 business customer, I am having the same problem with Plusnet at the moment myself. I have been waiting for Plusnet for 3 weeks now to fix my broadband fault. They always seam to place the blame on BT, and I hate it when they do that. They also blame my hardware which is less than 6 weeks old (recently upgraded to high end Cisco hardware). So 3 weeks into the fault ticket they have sent a BT Openreach PSTN (phone engineer) and they say that they have sent a BT broadband faults engineer to the exchange to change a possible faulty line card, and upgrade me to ADSL2+. So since this engineer has visited the exchange, I went from having a really crap connection to having nothing at all. The strange thing is tho when I log into my router I see a Sync speed of 888888Kbps up and 4577000Kbps down, so thats not right ether. Again I made a number of calls, where I was told because of the easter holidays I would have to go without my internet (which my business relys on) until the faults team return on Tuesday morning. I am really fed up and to add insult to injury they said to me if I pay an extra £9 (12 months contract) per month I can get BT's 3 to 4 hour fault responce time. I am not going to pay Plusnet another dime until they fix the concurrent issues on my service.
-7
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I am having exactly the same problems. Plusnet were supposed to activate my broadband on the 8th April..it is now the 19th April and still no service. I have made loads of phone calls...they told me the router must be broken, then they said there was a problem with the line and that they would test it and let me know. They didn't. I asked how much longer I am going to have to wait and they said they didn't know, could be days, weeks, who knows. I work from home (self-employed) and have lost about a thousand pounds in income and stop working for three weeks, with no end in sight. I don't know how they get away with it. Absolutely disgusting.
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Well plusnet what can I say??, I have been with them since 1999 (force9 then) and has reasonably good service till september last year, we live up on the mountain and a fair way from the exchange, my top isp speed was 448kbps, pretty happy with that, but somebody cut down one of the telegraph poles for firewood, now no end of problems loads of discoonection everytime the phone rings and low low speeds and today to make matters worse, bt/plusnet have said there is no more we can do as you are to far from the exchange, so like it or lump it :( or fork out £5000 to have your line put underground.
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I have the same problem as Mrs Qian with Plus Net.
I do not have a solution and am now looking for a new provider - they used to be ok but as someone else suggests they have expanded too rapidly and standards have slipped - shame - they are going to take a PR hit - foolish management.
I would not recommend them as they are not able to provide a decent service now.
I do not have a solution and am now looking for a new provider - they used to be ok but as someone else suggests they have expanded too rapidly and standards have slipped - shame - they are going to take a PR hit - foolish management.
I would not recommend them as they are not able to provide a decent service now.
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