It's a completely fair question, and if you're asking it because something's broken right now, we're sorry. That's a stressful moment to discover there's no number to ring.

So here's the honest answer, including the part that might not suit you.

Plio has never had a call centre. Every one of our support people works in chat, which means when you message us you're talking to someone who can actually fix what's going wrong and not someone whose job is to work out who to pass you to.

You're not stuck holding. Send us a message and get on with your evening. We'll reply in the same conversation, and it'll still be there when you come back to it, even if that's tomorrow.

You never have to explain it twice. Your whole history sits in one thread. If something comes up again next month, we can see what happened last time. No starting from the beginning, no repeating your address to a third person.

You can just show us. A photo of the lights on your Chorus box tells us more in two seconds than five minutes of trying to describe them down a phone line, and it saves you having to find the words for something you shouldn't need to know about.

Waiting doesn't cost you your evening. Restarting a router takes a few minutes. On a call, that's both of us sitting in silence. In chat, you go put the kettle on.

We'd rather be upfront that this suits us as well; it's not purely altruistic.

We can help more people at once. One person on a phone helps one household at a time, and everyone else waits. In chat, nobody sits in a queue while someone else checks a cable.

We can take a moment to get it right. Our team can check something properly, or quietly pull in a colleague who knows the network side, and come back with an answer that's actually right rather than one that's merely fast.

We bring the expert to you. Rather than transferring you somewhere else, we bring the person who knows the answer into your conversation. You stay put; the help moves.

We know going online-only is a real change, and for some people a phone line genuinely matters, because of how you communicate, or simply because it's what you're comfortable with. That's a completely legitimate thing to want.

Most people are surprised how much quicker chat turns out to be, and we'd love the chance to show you. But if being able to ring someone is a must-have, we'd rather say so now than have you find out later. No hard feelings either way. We want you to have the service that actually works for you.

Message us through the chat bubble in the bottom-right corner of your screen, or email [email protected]. Both reach the same people, and there's a real one on the other end.