Plusnet - only for those with a lot of time on their hands

They may be cheap. They may be from Yorkshire. But helping a neighbour transfer across to them has been a complete misery.

Their systems just don't seem geared to helping ordinary people. If you sign up before you have your MAC code, you will want to tell PlusNet what the MAC code is. There were links that promised to help you do this, but they linked to pages that didn't do what they promised. And their online help is so poor, too. Once you have logged on, and proved who you are, why can't the instructions on logins and passwords show the actual values that you need to use, rather than the "insert the original password you chose when signing up"? It all feels very lazy.

Come changeover day, the logon to PlusNet didn't work. Calling PlusNet, (approaching 10 minutes to speak to anyone) the agent spotted that the account hadn't been enabled at their end, and fixed that - we should wait a few minutes and try again. After another 10 minutes or so, it was indeed fixed. But why did we have to ask them? - they had written to say that changover was fixed for this date, so they must have known what needed doing and when.

And then there was the email. Any other ISP will provide you with an email address, or at least make sure that you have chosen one before you complete your signup. Not PlusNet - it is perfectly possible to sign up and not realise that you need to take the extra step of choosing an email address. And when you do that - please wait 4 HOURS for it to be enabled. Their agent said "it may work sooner" - what he didn't say was "within that four hours, it may start to work outbound, but don't be fooled into thinking that everything is then OK, as inbound mail may still be bounced with DNS errors".

All in all, a miserable experience. Unless we have been uniquely clumsy or unfortunate, PlusNet must be hacking off countless customers, and costing themselves a fortune in handling Customer Support calls.