Multithreaded

Update Jan 4th: Finally managed to get my account cancelled after a two-day saga.

If you are considering having Orange Broadband installed then think again. I had my Broadband Max, or whatever it is called, installed in mid-September and am still trying to get a decent service from them.

For the first month the line would not connect at all. To be fair, this was a fault on the BT line which also meant that voice calls were very noisy. When we contacted BT about it they said they couldn’t find a fault and that they could send an engineer out to us but if it turned out the problem was with our equipment then they would charge us for the visit. Nice company that threatens their customers with financial penalties for reporting problems. Still, this rant post is about Orange, not BT. Orange technical support requested a line test which, indeed, came back saying there was a potential problem on the line and, lo and behold, an engineer cleaned some contacts at the exchange and the noise on the voice calls is now gone.

That, however, was the last favour that Orange did me. Since then I have had a broadband connection which drops regularly. I’ve never seen it stay up for more than two hours and it often drops within a few minutes to half an hour. Sometimes it reconnects within a few minutes, but often it will stay down for an hour or two, cycling around making a connection and then dropping again after a few seconds.

I have spent upwards of 10 hours on the phone to Orange technical support in the past two months going around the same loop. They put in a request for a line test and ask me to call back in a couple of days to get the result, since they cannot seem to progress a problem without prompting. The result is always the same - a possible fault on the line. Please call back in 72 hours to get an update. Engineers believe the fault is fixed but the line is still dropping in the same intermittent fashion. Request a line test… - I’m now on the fourth iteration of this loop.

On Monday I decided I had had enough and asked for my account to be cancelled and for a refund. After having technical support tell me that they couldn’t do anything and I should speak to customer services, and customer services tell me that they couldn’t do anything and I should speak to technical support, I finally got escalated to escalations who cannot do anything as I am in a twelve month contract and because the line is up sometimes they won’t let me cancel as there is hope the problem can be corrected.

Now here’s the real kicker. Because the engineers have not made an appointment to visit my house and look at the line at that end, Orange consider that not all the possible diagnostics have been done and until all possible diagnostics have been done I cannot cancel. However, it it up to the engineers to decide if they think they need to make and appointment to visit my house and they currently don’t believe it is necessary. That means that I am entirely at Orange’s mercy to be able to cancel this service which does not work.

In addition, the engineers are not under any obligation to respond in any definite time-scale to get a problem resolved which is why, although the last request for them to look at it was on September 27th, I am still waiting for any kind of update from them a week later. As usual, the best that customer support can do is to ask me to call back again, on their national-rate number, in 24 hours to check for an update as they are incapable of calling me back when anything changes.

Apparently the engineers are quite busy at the moment which is why it is taking so long for them to get around to my fault (again). My understanding is that they are so busy because thousands of Orange LLU customers are suffering similar or other problems.

The frustrating thing is that when the line is up it is actually very fast. In the meantime I am still using my Easynet business broadband line which, though very expensive and only 2Mbps (only? three years ago that was a miracle!), has been down for a total of about 1 hour in all the years I’ve had it.

The whole experience has been so frustrating that I am considering moving my business mobile phone account to another provider in protest - if only I could find one that was any good. It is interesting that competition in the telecoms markets has simply resulted in price wars with no-one competing on quality of service.

Just in case the message wasn’t clear, don’t get Orange broadband.