Plusnet broadband outage: Customers fume as TITSUP* continues Plusnet has been slammed by its customers for failing to acknowledge or explain the cause of a nationwide broadband service outage. Twitter is stuffed with complaints from around 7am on Friday morning that service has not been resumed following an apparent maintenance period. Plusnet’s service has been struck down across the …
It was flaky in West London this morning. Some sites - e.g. BBC, wherever Logitech SqueezeBoxes point to - wouldn't resolve at all - while others were unaffected. If I hadn't turned on the radio and also tried to check the weather forecast, I wouldn't have known it was happening.
Their 'Service Status' site was misleading as it reported nothing except routine maintenance this morning, so they lose respect for fibbing.
Not surprised, PlusNet have (Or did when I was with them a few years ago) absolutely brutal traffic shaping/bandwidth management. P2P, HTTP downloads, FTP downloads, torrents, all capped to ridiculously low speeds unless you pay way over the odds for their 'unrestricted' service.
Switched to sky fibre unlimited, never looked back...
Virgin Media fibre was down in my area for over 2 days.
Their support website (which I checked on 4g) said it was down to a local problem - with no further information. I phoned their lovely Indian call centre who simply read out what it said on the support website and volunteered no further information other than they were "working on it".
It's back up now and to be fair I haven't had any problems with it for the 10 months I've had it. But Virgin's customer service makes these guys look like pros.
Ironically I switched from Plusnet to Virgin because all reviews I'd heard suggested Virgin was miles better. I disagree though. Plusnet never gave me any issues and I always thought their customer service was far better than any other ISP I'd dealt with.
I've used Virgin cable for years (since it was NTL) and it has generally been very good with decent speeds, very little congestion (if any), and very few outages - maybe 5 I've noticed in over 10 years.
God help you though if you do have a problem and have to call support.
Agreed,
I've had Virgin for longer than I can remember (old Blueyonder customer) And I have always had an excellent connection. Yes, there are the occasional connection problem, but they are fixed quickly.
And yes, their "customer service" is crap. but as I so rarely need to call, I've been able to live with it. No one is perfect.
I deal with VM both as a business and a residential customer and the difference is chalk and cheese. On the business side any issues are normally dealt with as I am talking to them and if they say they will ring back they do. Well worth switching to the businesses package if you require a reliable service.
I left Plusnet a few months ago (for Co-op Broadband) because of their customer service. Or, to be honest, because of their television adverts crowing about how great their customer service is.
A storm took out an overhead cable. It happens, and it's BT's wire, not Plusnet's. But I was without service for 19 days, having been told twice it was fixed when it wasn't. When I phoned for updates (which was most days) I had to hold on for about 20 minutes before speaking to someone. Except this one time when, after 20 minutes, the call was dropped.
If I sent a message through their support ticket system, it would be promptly answered in three days.
My feeling is that Plusnet has greatly expanded its customer base without expanding the support teams in proportion.
My router disconnected at around 10:00 am - but other than that no real issues (but I am VPN'd into work)
https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/High-packet-loss-and-other-DNS-issues/td-p/1354749
I know Plusnet is migrating from a BT shared network for small ISPs to a new dedicated network, and there has been a lot of issues on new network - fortunately I believe I am still on old n/w as I picked a static IP some time ago
It was all going a bit wibbly last night but never actually cut out.
I'm not surprised that Plusnet is taking the tack of burying it's head in the sand and pretending there are not problems. It took them six weeks to turn on my phone line. There was nothing wrong with the line Plusnet just couldn't grasp the idea that because I was moving exchange I couldn't keep my number. I knew I couldn't keep the number, they told me they knew I couldn't keep the number but they kept cancelling the order because I couldn't keep the number. Of course they didn't tell me they'd cancelled the order (I had to ask them to redo it six times), head in the sand you see. Can't hear anything, la la la.
And that promised refund for the weeks without service?
La la la la can't hear you
Yeah network was up and router lights all flashing as per normal this morning, but couldn't get any data over breakfast. Assumed it was just my shitty EO line which drops out just when you dont want it to every week or two. I switched my phone wifi off and was surprised to discover 4G connectivity from my kitchen on O2. Needless to say data and streaming were much better than the broadband, but that is OpenReach's fault, not PlusNet.
I dont use Twatter (i'm on it, but dont use it), so wasn't aware there was a problem until El Reg mentioned it.
"Needless to say data and streaming were much better than the broadband, but that is OpenReach's fault, not PlusNet."
Problems with the lines are an issue between your ISP and Openretch, not yours to assign blame to.
The Big6 are all equally bad when it comes to letting Openretch get away with doing nothing or closing faults without fixing things properly. Smaller ISPs (such as co-op broadband) tend to saddle up and keep riding them until it's fixed.
I was offline this morning too. I find it a little reassuring when a story about that kind of problem shows up on the Reg- at least it means it's a big problem that will probably get addressed. If I have a problem that means they have to get BT involved ( they're part of BT, but apparently not in any useful sense ) then it will be a long time before I see any internet.
If I have a problem that means they have to get BT involved then it will be a long time before I see any internet.
That's a fact of life I'm afraid. With Openreach still responsible for the 'last mile' no matter if your ISP is PlusNet, TalkTalk, Sky and just about everyone else apart from Virgin and a few local companies (Hull Telecom etc)
No one wants to own (and thus have to pay for the upkeep) the poles and cables coming out of all those green cabinets. so we are stuck with them, good or bad (mostly bad).
The same goes for the Exchanges that don't have the kit (for several reasons) owned by your ISP in them.
I live in surrey and the outage hit me at 3am...ping to America went to 999+.. trying to reconnect the problem got worse... could not open any of the three browsers but teamspeak would still work. but was dropping 10% packet loss.....after 2 hours of unpluging and reconnecting and trying different things.decided to connect direct to the fibre box still nothing... conclusion was not my fault....5am phoned plusnet .... found out no longer 24hr service....went to bed...12 am the next day still suffering packet loss.
I normally get 65-70mb been with plusnet for 3 years and get the odd hiccup....just hope this will get fixed soon
Just moved away from Plusnet after being with them for over 3 years. Never had any real problems with them. Apart from the lies that their customer service seem to spout instead of being honest. I can take outages but I cannot tolerate lies. Glad I've moved on.
PS Still getting emails from them about my bounced payments even though I am no longer with them.
Most mass market ISPs try to bullshit their customers about outages, often they will make customers believe the problem is their equipment and have them reboot endlessly until the problem is resolved.
Personally i'd rather just be told theres an outage and how long they expect it to take to fix, but ISPs think that will make them look bad.
Office 365 is cloud e-mail, would you prefer to host your own exchange server, on premise? Think about that for a second... (And your office 365 locally installed software doesn't immediately stop working the second the internet cuts out).
At least if your internet fails and you have hosted exchange/365, you can still hop onto the internet via a 4G hotspot with your phone and continue like nothing has changed. Try failing your on-premise exchange over to a 4G connection... best of luck!
I do sometimes wonder how we lived without the interweb.
These days, an outage is front page news and social media is full of customers #outraging, initial reaction is to phone support (that's often India), this only results in more #outrage, asked to turn it on and off, more #outage maybe a #disgrace then 30 mins later told its an issue in the local area and reaction is a massive #outrage #disgrace and perhaps a rofl emoji.
I mean, things go wrong from time to time, that's life, if it isn't working, chill, facebook will live on, go outside, see a tree, ask your kids how their day was, take them for an ice cream, watch a movie.. go see some friends and converse, have a pint, have a few pints, get in trouble with the Mrs, blame your ISP for it. You will survive. #brofist.
Well being older most of my friends live in other parts of the country now, of those that are "local" as in also live around London one is off climbing mountains and the other is busy.
I've drasticaly reduced drinking for both financial and health reasons, but even then the work colleague I do go drinking with has to go take care of a dying relative and I don't have a functioning TV anymore (discovered a few years back I wasn't ready for the digital switch over). I don't have kids, nor a partner. I could look at a tree, but I don't want to look at a tree. I was quite looking forward to watching some streaming on twitch and playing games with my friends from afar. Live streams really don't like packet loss.
Also this weekend is the GSL, ASL and SSL grand finals as well as the COPA invitational, so while I'm not too irritable at the moment if it's still down tomorrow I'll be mighty mad. The problem has evidently been going on since last night. So they should pull a finger out and get to it.
10% packet loss atm
They have always been pants, and will continue to be pants long into the future.
Awards?? Set up by big ISPs, Funded by big ISPs and given almost exclusively to big ISPs.
AND they have a habit of secretly capping your line speed; I warned my parents for years that the excuses given were not true - there is no congestion on the exchange - I was on the exact same exchange - lived FURTHER from it in cable length - yet got 3 times the speed.
Eventually, after 10 years they admitted there was a problem - when I installed a new router that could display the line data, and they tried to get PN to sort it out - which led to nothing but prevarication for over a month - until I PUBLISHED what was going on.
WHOA!!! within 24 hours their line speed nearly trebled, from 2.2Mb to 6Mb.
The line was sync'ed solidly at 6.6Mb, and the only time I have had 2.2Mb was on ADSLMAX, my ADSL2+ connection, before I switched to fibre - was 6.8Mb sync/6.4 throughput.
The router I gave her shows a lot of line stats, including the ADSL settings, and the line was on the correct ADSL settings. ADSL2+ - which is up to 24Mb, not upto 2.4Mb.
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80Mbps FTTC. Was flaky for a while early Friday morning but still usable, Recovered around midday and is now faster than ever. Torrents used to be bursty - varying up and down - but now coming in at a solid 8.2 MB/sec.
Apparently +net are moving away from BT's network to their own and this maintenance overrun was a result of that work.
What really bothers me is that the account name and password on your PN router has to be the same as the acount name and password that you need to use to log in to your account at PN.
The CS rep then uses that password as part of your ID check.
It therefore follows that your account password is either stored in plain text or easily decrypted.
Surely that is verging on criminally irresponsible in these days of mega login and data breaches.
"I've not seen a single comment from anyone who has no internet access??????"
Either you're very unsure about that, or your keyboard is jammed, or you don't know the difference between a question and a statement and you're unsure of how many question marks are needed to indicate the preceding statement was a question. Here's a hint, the number of question marks required for that is an integer (n) such that 2 > n > 0. HTH.
Yeah we had problems too in Cambridgeshire. Even hit the red light on the modem sometimes - no t'internet.
PN speeds have been generally good for downloads, we get about 20MBps now over ADSL, but uplink speed is appalling, only about 300k.
Data usage is fine too - I think we hit 200GB last month with no problems - in the old days with Demon that would have reduced speeds to a crawl.
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