Plusnet slow line speed - BT line test "inconclusive"- what next?

usignuolo

My sister who is self employed, works from home, and is not a technical person. But she does have broadband into her house which she uses for email and some internet look ups. Around the end of last year she changed to PlusNet and was reporting it was very good, until three weeks ago. Then the line speed suddenly dropped to around 2mbs and made it unusable. She had a series of increasingly heated exchanges with PlusNet who insisted their service was fault free and the problem must be with her kit- one guy insisted it was a wifi fault at her end even though she was reporting the fault on her office pc which is on a direct cable into the router.

So the PC Repair shop manager himself came round, showed her that she was on a direct cable connection, not using wifi, checked out all the configurations and then rang PlusNet on her behalf and ran them through all the diagnostics to demonstrate that her local end was correctly set up and not registering any local faults.

At this stage they rather grumpily said they would arrange for BT to test the line but she would have to pay if it was her kit which was fault. A BT engineer phoned and asked her to log into their Workspace server and run some line speed diagnostics - the results came back as "inconclusive". Line speed was still showing as 2mb. The BT engineer said this meant it was a PlusNet fault and referred her back to them. *Shunt the punter" clearly still lives on at BT. PlusNet say it is nothing to do with them.

She is stuck at an impasse, it is impacting her work as she desperately needs her broadband access for sending and receiving email and reports. She does not speak techie but the PC Repair shop manager did and convinced PlusNet there was not a problem with her set up.

Where does she go from here? I will preempt some comments by saying she has no other electronic kit in her house apart from TV and DVD player and has not replaced anything recently. She lives in a quiet residential street and the area is not known for being a black spot for internet access. It is not a wifi problem as she is not using wifi on her office pc.

Any suggestions on how to proceed? (There is no cable locally.)

Peter999_2

Whenever I've had a problem I've got the best results from posting on their forum. The plusnet forum guys are far more on the ball than the call centre.

You can register and post here :

http://community.plus.net/forum/

usignuolo

Now I am the one feeling technically challenged! I followed the link to the PlusNet forum and clicked on the box to register as a PlusNet user, for my sister. This redirected me to the PlusNet site which prompted me to log in with my user name and password, which I don't have because I haven't yet registered. I have searched the PlusNet screen and can find no option to actually register rather than log in. Advice Please?

mattyprice4004

You need to be a customer to register, so your sister will need to do it.

Also, if the BT line passes the test (assuming its a BT wholesale line) the issue needs to be raised by plus net, NOT BT.

Peter999_2

Hi,

The username and password is what she will have selected when she very first signed up. I presume this is to ensure that only Plusnet customers can access the forum.

I've just checked and the username is on the initial welcome email you recieve from Plusnet when you sign up. Also, if you look on the webpages on the router it will be the username used to connect to Plusnet (I use a different router to the supplied one so I can't tell you the exact page).

Everything you sign onto with Plusnet uses the same user id and password.

usignuolo

Thanks for that I will ask her. She said PlusNet are adamant there are no issues at their end, the PC repair centre manager is adamant there are no issues with her kit or set up and when she managed to run the test with the BT server, although it was indeed showing only 2mbs speed, it reported the findings as "inconclusive". BT says that means it is a PlusNet problem not their problem. PlusNet says it is a problem at her side and nothing to do with them.

I did look at the PlusNet forum as a visitor and there is a least one new post on it from someone with the same problem as of yesterday. I will keep an eye on it. I am going round to my sisters tomorrow to help her sort it out and will see if we can register then. Hopefully she has kept the welcome correspondence.

(I am not entirely hopeful. She and her boyfriend know next to nothing about IT and rely upon someone else to do it all for them. The local PC shop configured her network connection and wwhen I took my laptop over there to her house last week she had no idea what her wifi password was for me to log in. So we went to see her boyfriend who lives round the corner and has quite a sophisticated home network. I asked him for the wifi password to log in my laptop and he said he had no idea, his firm set itall up as he is homebased, but he has no idea what kit he has or how it works or what the wifi password is ........)

Peter999_2

I have had people on the phone at the call centre saying that there was a problem that could not be fixed (they were saying that my line wouldn't support fibre even though I knew for certain it would).
I spent an hour on the phone arguing with them but got no-where (and to be honest I got the impression they didn't really care). I cancelled the whole lot, but posted on the forum for a moan.

The forum team looked into it for me, got the line fixed and fibre was installed 4 days later. It was so much easier as they can't !!!!!!!! on-line as much as they can on a phone. I have had other billing problems and they were all fixed within an hour of posting on the forum.

Definately try the forum, I really hope you get somewhere.

macman

She needs to retest the line using ethernet from the master socket's test socket (behind the split faceplate). Doing this take the domestic wiring and extensions out of the equation. If the fault remains then it's a line or exchange issue, and the repair is not chargeable,

Plusnet_company_representative

Hi usignuolo,

Really sorry to hear about this. If you could post a ticket ID from her account into this thread we can take a look and check on things for you if you like, see if we can get things moving?

Regards,

Matt Taylor
Customer Support

usignuolo

OK update for PlusNet. Went over to my sisters on sunday, (she is in bed with flu). Ran recommended line speed test on her adsl line to BT wholesale server. Got back download speed of 0.3mbs. Phoned PlusNet and spoke to Mark who ran some tests and confirmed this and that speed into house is around 14mbs. Said fault must be in house.

I checked connection at socket and it is a Dlink into the regular socket with 2 outputs, phone and ADSL. My sister said fault developed suddenly on 26 March and she had not changed anything in her house at that time.

Mark said needed BT to check line into house which would cost £60 if her fault it did not work. My sister said yes, that she had already agreed to this first time round and the BT engineer who contacted her had told her to run the line speed tests first, which she had done, and reported - they had given similar results to the ones I ran. So she said she had been round this loop once with no result.

Mark said he would contact PlusNet support team who would contact her on Monday (yesterday). Phoned her last night, they had not been in touch. Spoke to her this morning (Tuesday) and she told me she phoned again them today and they promised to get back to her later today. Mmmm.

Her Ticket No is 677 10672

macman

usignuolo wrote: »

OK update for PlusNet. Went over to my sisters on sunday, (she is in bed with flu). Ran recommended line speed test on her adsl line to BT wholesale server. Got back download speed of 0.3mbs. Phoned PlusNet and spoke to Mark who ran some tests and confirmed this and that speed into house is around 14mbs. Said fault must be in house.

I checked connection at socket and it is a Dlink into the regular socket with 2 outputs, phone and ADSL. My sister said fault developed suddenly on 26 March and she had not changed anything in her house at that time.

Mark said needed BT to check line into house which would cost £60 if her fault it did not work. My sister said yes, that she had already agreed to this first time round and the BT engineer who contacted her had told her to run the line speed tests first, which she had done, and reported - they had given similar results to the ones I ran. So she said she had been round this loop once with no result.

Mark said he would contact PlusNet support team who would contact her on Monday (yesterday). Phoned her last night, they had not been in touch. Spoke to her this morning (Tuesday) and she told me she phoned again them today and they promised to get back to her later today. Mmmm.

Her Ticket No is 677 10672

See post 8. This is very simply resolved if you woud just run the test by ethernet from the BT test socket behind the master socket split faceplate. Only that will tell you if the line or domestic wiring/extensions are at fault-and therefore whether the call out is chargeable.
Testing from a 'regular' socket that could be the master, or could be an extension, tells you nothing.