Never use Plusnet!

When I moved to my current house I inherited a Plusnet ADSL account. Inheriting the existing ADSL meant I had no downtime when moving in (none of the 10 day wait for BT to sort things out) so suited me perfectly.

Quickly it became clear that Plusnet was adequate but not great. Traffic shaping made working on a couple of servers at evenings and weekends impossible (we run ssh on a non-standard port, which led to an 8-10 second delay between typing and seeing the result on-screen - sure I could tunnel via another server, but it’s effort). I live in the middle of a city and the broadband (ADSL Max) was set on a 2MB profile. Try as I might, I couldn’t get Plusnet’s technical support to agree to get the line profile reset in order to see what the line would handle. I knew this profile had been in place since 2004 - and given friends living in the middle of nowhere get faster broadband I figured we should!

Anyhow, a culmination of things led to me arranging a migration to ADSL24, an Entanet reseller. Getting the MAC code from Plusnet was painful but nowhere near as bad as getting one from BT Broadband Everything was going smoothly with migration set for 10 December until…

…at quarter to 1 on Friday morning (7 December) our broadband account was deleted. I didn’t know that at the time, or even that it had stopped working. I was asleep. Waking the next moring I first thought the migration had gone ahead and tried the new connection details. Nothing.

Because of my work having working broadband is critical. Especially as on Friday I was supposed to be doing a rush job (actually the client didn’t get me the necessary information, but still…)

So at 9.30am I phoned Plusnet. Sat on hold for 10 minutes listening to dreaful music. The support technician looked at our account and said “The tag on your phone line is set to Entanet, the migration must have gone ahead. Talke to them”.

So I phoned Entanet. And sat on hold for 10 minutes listening to slightly better music. I got through to a very efficient lady who explained that the migration wasn’t yet underway, it’s normal for the tag to change early (so Plusnet are at fault), and would I like BT’s number to talk to them?”

So I phoned BT. And got through to an extremely friendly and helpful chap. Say what you will about BT, but they know how to train their customer service operators. He looked up the line and the migration status, confirmed what Entanet had told me, confirmed that a migration should be seamless.

So I phoned Plusnet. Sat on hold for nearly 15 minutes listening to some dreadful music. Just as the Elton John came on I got through to an operator (doh!) who probably didn’t know what hit him. I stated everything BT had said and this time he agreed that the service needed re-instating. Which he did. Unfortunately Plusnet’s system wouldn’t let them reactivate my account without billing me for another month’s broadband, but I have been promised a refund. I wait with baited breath…