Given that we are heading towards the most scary time of year (Christmas), I wanted to write about another horror which fell upon me during September. You see, it was a bit of a trying month when it came to trying to get and keep a stable internet connection.

Of course these are first world problems where there are far more horrifying issues occurring elsewhere (all of which seems to getting far far worse), but nevertheless in a strange sort of way, writing about what happened and the hair burning / pulling that occurred during this little adventure may actually prove therapeutic in some respects.

You didn’t think the story would end did you?

As you would have been made aware the last time I decided to become a keyboard warrior when it came to Rocko’s Modern Life, I was leaving BT, home of increasing prices and ever poorer service thanks to people kicking around footballs for a living for Plusnet. Now given that Plusnet is owned by BT anyway, you may have wondered why they were chosen.

Plusnet were the few providers to offer an alternative ADSL based business solution for slightly increased upload (something wanted for the live-streaming to be more stable), which was the closest I can get without going to the like of Verizon to get a full on lease line installed at around £400 a month for even the most basic speeds….though if I do sell a kidney, and a lung….no no, that’s just silly…..maybe….

So all was set in motion and you would have thought that it would have been a simple thing to do, given that these days, the transfer process is supposed to be seemless when switching between the major providers.

This was the internet for me for the best part of a week.

Unfortunately as expected, BT once again cut me off from the internet, which once again continues the wonderful run of failing to get it right every single time while living in London. A record I am sure they surely wouldn’t want, but hey they seemed to do their up-most to appear useless. Luckily for me this time, I was able to destroy the remaining data allocation from the mobile phone to unlock Mad Max and Metal Gear Solid to play offline in the meantime.

But that’s only getting to the truly horrible story from the BT Openreach engineer who was tasked by Plusnet to go fix the problem one Tuesday morning. He was stopped from going into the exchange because of clearance, therefore had to hang around waiting for someone to wake and go plug the cable back in correctly, and he took the time to update the phone box to remove the need for a DSL filter.

During this time, he basically stated they have to clear a lot of jobs each day even if problems take a long time, otherwise they appear to not be performing. This can lead to disciplinary actions and dismissal, even if it meant they were trying to do a decent job. This appears to be the reason why they get a lot of repeat calls as basically most people do a half assed job due to time pressures (and in a lot of cases people incapable of doing the job in the first place) and then it has to be revisited properly at a later date by someone else.

This means that it really will always be a lottery as to whether or not you will get someone who will do what you ask and that fault remains solely at BT, whether or not Openreach is treated as a separate company. So we look forward to yet another post further down the line when BT fail again.

They came back…… they are undead, you cannot kill them.

But wait…..there was also one last ridiculous insult to the ordeal of trying to leave BT. You see, they then tried to state that despite the fact I was leaving due to a Price Change, which Ofcom completely said is within my rights as a consumer, I would owe them over £130. A couple of long phone calls later and that was finally cleared up.

And even better after the internet was restored by the one Openreach engineer who actually did a decent job, BT proceeded to send an email that I was on a new phone package with them. This was impossible due to the fact Plusnet took the phone over and as there was only one phone line, this lead to a heated series of phone calls between Plusnet and BT to find out who had screwed up this time.

Plusnet were completely in the clear, they actually had done everything correctly, and to that effect, I even called back and apologised to the people who had to deal with my wrath. BT basically had tied the phone service to the account but not to any phone line. This I only found out at the third time of calling BT, the first two service people were about as useful as lolly sticks and sello tape being used to keep a man’s naughty part awake. Now finally after spending a lot of time getting away from them, BT are now thankfully a memory to be left behind until it ever becomes necessary to have another encounter.

So now I’ve been on Plusnet for the best part of a month on ADSL Annex M, I suppose it’s about time to write up my thoughts on how they have been performing as an ISP and the service itself now it’s been on.

The little white box of doom. Come on it’s a router, it’s hard to make it sound interesting!

Well first of all, the customer service has been a hell of a lot better than BT ever tried to be, which you could argue was supposed to be the case given this is now a business service at a home location. It’s just nice to say that even in the face of my anger, they still carried on giving me all I asked for and they do have to be applauded for that.

The Internet provided by Plusnet however, has had some problems already. The router I had was supposed to support Annex M, but apparently it doesn’t work with the configuration on the line, so Plusnet had to send out their own router for the increased upload to work. Decent internet if you use wires, but…..wireless is back to being p*ss poor.

There was an outage of service one Thursday due to a router failing somewhere and that lead to huge parts of the internet being unavailable. There were also times when I couldn’t reach various sites which normally should work, which included by the way, Blizzard Entertainment’s own Battle.Net web service which I had to reach to resolve an issue with an account. This was worked around with a VPN connecting to a server based in London, and that has been the case a few times.

It seems Plusnet’s routing and response times are hit and miss. Again, further usage will determine if there is a real problem with their network. It could be the router but I need that for the upload increase to register.

Speaking of which, the upload speed has only increased a little bit compared to what others could have had (it went up about 350kbits as opposed to the possible max of 1.7Mbit increase).

But it has been enough to get some consistent response on Twitch so it’s better than nothing. I am still debating however if it was worth the worse download situation, which can sustain even fewer operations at the same time than before. Netflix also takes between 10 – 20 seconds to go HD so it’s slower to stream content for sure.

Thankfully Plusnet allow me to remove the Annex M option any time so I can save the £10 extra it costs a month to sustain the increased upload, and maybe go back to the router I used before when it was plain old ADSL which means the wireless works across the flat again as opposed to just the front room.

So Plusnet, good customer service, ADSL is so so.

For the record, I miss Fibre Broadband. More than sex and that says something. Something bad actually, come to think of it…..