Broadband users unhappy because of technical failures

Orange's Un-technical support

I have been with freeserve on dial up, which changed to wanadoo, who we went with broadband with, and then that changed to orange, all in all the only ISP that we have used, apart from tiscali for a small period on dial-up, has been orange.

In early January we got a letter saying that they were going to upgrade my line, Great i thought, bearing in mind i get an upload of 288kbps and a max download of 2.0 Mbps. And thats at good times, Two weeks later the service was about the same, constant drop outs, slow speeds etc etc, I dont blame orange for the poor speed completely as i am pretty far from my exchange, well i end up in the middle of two exchanges. But the connection drop outs are quite frankly annoying. Anyway, Two weeks after the internet i get home from work and..... no internet, check router settings, nope all okay, log says failing to establish connection, Ring Orange after navigating their call centre i get a guy, with a very strong accent ask me what operating system i am running "Linux" i reply. "is that XP or Vista" after about 10 attempts of explaining that Linux isnt either XP or Vista i give up and tell him that the O/S isn't a valid point as i am connecting throught the router. He then informs me that there is work on the line and that i should call back in 24hrs

24hrs later..... No internet call back, same story call in 24 hours,
24Hrs later,... No internet, so i eventually convince the "tech-support" to do a line test after he doesnt believe that linux is an O/S and i convince him that every setting on my network is correct. the only response i get from him is that he has to escalate it to his supervisor and that it will take 5 working days

6 working days later i get my internet back, the same speeds as before and constant connection drop outs, A total of 10 days without internet because of a line upgrade that left me in the same dissatisfied state.

Unfortunately the internet is tied to a mobile phone so i can't easily change my ISP, especially as its not my mobile phone, i did recently try to change the ISP and keep the phone number but orange said that its impossible so i could either pay for broadband twice or have to change someone in my family's phone number, they wouldnt be happy.

I have received the worst service i have ever experianced from any company from orange and i do plan to send letters to the relevant people, i just havn't had the time with the internet to compose a letter.

Posted by: Adam Lowe  08 Feb 2008

broadband technical failiures

I am surprised to read that Orange has such a bad reputation according to the survey and after reading Faisal's comments about their inability to rectify the problem I felt the need to comment on my experiences. I too am with Orange and have been for nearly five years , 3 1/2 of those on broadband and can honestly say that on the single occasion that I had reason to ring their customer support number I found them to be patient and helpful (once I had managed to get used to English spoken with a foreign accent!). However my problem occured immediately after installing Windows ME and I had to force the person to check with a collegue as to certain specific steps for ME after I was told that I should puchase a copy of XP (which I am now using) to sort out the problem.I said "Are you telling me Broadband won't work with ME" "No, but I would have to ask someone else how to set up with ME" "If you would then please!" But after a thorough explanation exhausting all possible causes for my problem, there was nothing more to do their end. This was entirely true, they HAD done all they could and suggested the problem was with my machine - I agreed. After reloading ME after much frustration, I stumbled upon what I thought might be the problem by accident. When setting up windows there is a screen that asks you to fill in name and workgroup etc but also includes a windows randomly generated computer I.D. WHICH IS DIFFERENT EACH TIME WINDOWS IS LOADED. Now as this is the I.D. used to "identify the computer to the network" I suddenly thought that if this new I.D. was being rejected by Orange because it was different from the previous one (when I signed up for broadband originally) then perhaps this was why I could only proceed as far as making the initial connection to Orange but was unable to actually access the internet. This may be common knowledge to many but I was unaware of it. I might be allowed to argue that we were both innocent but as I have on many occasions realised after visiting help forums, the moral of the story is DONT ASSUME THAT THE FAULT LIES WITH THE ISP AND THAT EVERYTHING IS IN ORDER AT YOUR END BECAUSE PCs CAN LULL YOU INTO A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY. Some may know more than others but no-one knows everything! I have experienced a day when the network was down and two or three days when the speed was so slow the net was effectively unusable, but other than that Orange provides internet access and just lets you get on with it in peace choosing not to "infect" your machine with unnecessary associated programs and information deemed necessary to provide you with lots of ways to "peronalise your internet experience and make it more productive and enjoyable" that just clog up your system and cause it to run at a snails pace. (mentioning no names - but AOL might cross your mind)

Posted by: David Bowman  03 Feb 2008

Orange Broaband -Worst Customer Service, Bad Technical Department

I have switched to Orange Broadband from BT and from the first st Day I haven't received broadband. I haven't connected even for a single second and I am paying to Orange for not using the service how funny is this. When I make a call to Orange all the time they pass me to different departments and at the end of the call they have the same default sentence to say that "I can't do more than that so please give us a call back in 4-5 hours." I have taken two days off for waiting for the engineers to come to my home to fix the problem but no one poped in or no one has given me a call stating that they are not coming.

Finally when I went to cancel the contract I can't do that as I have a 12 months contract for not using the internet. I am so much fade up and now don't know who to contact and what to do.....please help me out..

Posted by: Faisal Khowaja  13 Jul 2007