Saturday 7 May 2011

PlusNet now stable but ...

After a lot of effort by ourselves we now have a stable secondary ADSL connection from Plus.net. The broadband link feeds into a dual ported firewall which we run in a load balance mode most of the time.
The link is not as fast as we'd hoped running at something like 3.5 Mbps for download. At the time of installation Plus.Net measured the line and predicted a speed of something like 6 Mbps. However as a backup Internet link it is bearable.

Sadly though plus.net (owned by BT) continue to show their consumer service level roots. They just don't seem to understand the service levels expected by business, despite us paying them an additional fee for support. During the set up process Plus.Net had to send us two additional new ADSL Routers before they finally managed to provide they service we'd ordered (excluding the issue of the predicted line speed). 

We have the two spare routers here waiting collection arrangements. We'd been told return envelopes would be sent to us. A couple of days ago we received one return envelope. It contained no instructions and the Return Envelope was actually addressed to a British Telecom site. There was no indication it had come from Plus.net.  We had to use our telepathic powers to deduce this. Not wanting to "lose" a router we posted an enquiry on the support page of Plus.net and they responded after a few hours confirming the envelope had come from them. We despatched someone down to the local Post Office with the parcel to get a "Proof of Posting" for the non-tracked second class return parcel. Yet again more wasted effort for our company due to Plus.net inefficiency. Apparently another return envelope is on the way for the second router, this of course means another trip by us to the Post Office. In total we reckon that Plus.net's inefficiency has cost us about 5 man days wasted effort.

Shortly after we were checking our plus.net account records and discovered they'd added a £25 cessation charge for the removal of ADSL from the phone circuit. We'd not ceased the service and the phone line had not previously had an ADSL service present. It took another support query by us to Plus.net to establish the £25 was a "might be charged if we cancel the service" fee but we'd not actually been invoiced for it. This of course had not been mentioned when we ordered the service. More wasted time on our part. It is this type of practise that will cause us not to do business with a supplier. We do not like sneak charges added without our agreement or notice to us.
Oaksys


Update: 18th My 2012 We had another unexplained outage on the plusnet service this morning for a few hours. We've learned to leave it a few hours before attempting to fix the problem as usually they sort themselves out after a few hours without our intervention.

No comments:

Post a Comment

We automatically delete any SPAM comments. All comments are subject to moderation before publishing. Any SPAM is individually reported to Google as such, this reduces the offending site's Google Ranking.