The end of an Orange nightmare
January 4, 2007
Well, Orange have finally agreed to close down my broadband account, 3 and a half months after installing it. At no time was the service fit for purpose. At best, I would get several line drops an hour with an immediate reconnect, at worst no service at all. From the morning of December 23rd until now I have had no connection at all.
I finally managed to persuade technical support that raising another line test request was not going to be worth it. They tried to tell me that they couldn’t raise a cancellation authorization as no line test had been done in December. I politely pointed out that the reason no line test had been done in December was because it had taken their engineers four and a half weeks to respond to the fault which was raised at the end of November. Eventually, after consulting his supervisor, the support guy, who really was very helpful and stayed calm despite my ranting, told me that he would raise a cancellation authorization. However, his system was down which meant he couldn’t do it there and then but he promised that he would put in all the details and that I should give customer services a call an hour and a half later to complete the cancellation.
Actually, I waited until the next day as 40 minutes on the line with Orange was all I could stand that day. When I did call, much to my surprise, the cancellation authorization was there on my accounts records and a very chirpy young lady agreed to start processing it. Too good to be true, however. When she contacted Customer Care (the Orange department naming committee clearly have a strong sense of irony) they told her that they would not process the cancellation since “not enough diagnostics had been carried out and they needed to send me a new modem”. She argued my case, even consulting the official procedures manual and pointing out to them the bit which said that if tech support had raised the authorization then they had no choice. Customer Care responded that they could override the cancellation if not enough diagnostics had been done. She took the matter up with her supervisor who insisted that CC could not refuse to cancel and even spoke to them directly whilst I held to clear the matter up and finally came back to me to say that Customer Care had agreed to do the cancellation and that he would clear the outstanding balance on my account (I cancelled my direct debit last month) and that if I had any problem I could contact him personally.
So finally I seem to be free of the abomination that is Orange Broadband. There’s something I don’t understand, though. Why would a company treat its customers like this? What do they possibly hope to gain by subjecting them to atrocious levels of service, making them hold for 15 minutes or more in order to speak to people who have no control over the situation; holding customers to the letter of a contract when it is clear that the service is not working; continuing to take money from people when they are not providing a working service with the threat of legal action if they default.
Even had Orange sorted out the problems and got me a working service, I would have terminated it at the end of the contract anyway. I have been an Orange mobile phone customer for over a decade, which is why I signed up for their broadband in the first place, but now I want nothing to do with them. I am actively seeking another provider for my £250-£300 per month business mobile phone services. In other words, because of so doggedly trying to hold on to £20 per month of broadband income they have alienated a loyal customer so much that they are going to lose more than 10 times that revenue in another area of their business.
If Orange do not sort out this situation quickly I think they do not have a very bright future. Somehow, though, I don’t see them getting it sorted. The automated switchboard message had changed when I called yesterday. It said that it was taking 8 to 10 days longer than usual to send out new live boxes because of the extra large number of sign-ups they were dealing with. All I could think of was poor sods who are going to have to go through what I did.
Can anyone recommend a good mobile phone provider in the UK?
[…] Update Jan 4th: Finally managed to get my account cancelled after a two-day saga. […]
Pingback by What did you learn at the office today? » Orange broadband - a bad joke — January 21, 2007 @ 4:57 pm
Doug
I’ve had a mirror-image experience to yours. Long time mobile client of Orange (10+ years), offered free broadband last August, accepted the offer in exchange for extending my mobile contract 12 months (worst decision I have ever made… period). Live box delivered, broadband installed, everything OK for 2 months then rapid deterioration of service last December. I was given the runaround by the Indian techies for 3 weeks. ‘Service’ got so bad that I had to use a local internet cafe to sort my daily email. I was getting so wound up by Orange’s unscrupulous behavior that I ended up sending an abusive snail mail to their oxymoronically titled Customer Care dept. All I got back was a patronizing form letter telling me that they were upgrading me to a 8Mb feed. As if! That was the last straw. Decided that there is no such thing as free broadband and contacted Virgin. My God, what a world of difference. I had cable installed within a week. And when I told them about the nightmare I had had with Orange, they let me have my first 3 months rental with them for free, just to prove to me how very different they are. Thank you very much Richard Branson! The Virgin cable connection was up and running from scratch in 20 minutes and has not dropped out or failed once. Woo hoo! And it is delivering a true 2Mb connection. If you’re still looking for an alternative supplier, I can whole heartedly recommend Virgin. Word of advice - bad mouth Orange to them and you too could end up your first 3 months rental free!
Cheers,
Joe Dever.
PS. I have kicked my Orange mobile contract to the kerb and switched my account to Virgin as well. That’s £100+ monthly the big ‘O’ can kiss goodbye to. I have never hated a company so much in my life, I simply will not have anything to do with them ever again. And one last point that might raise a smile - I returned their livebox… but only after I’d used it for an afternoon’s clay pidgeon shooting practice!
Comment by Joe Dever — April 3, 2007 @ 5:42 am
Hi guys,
Having read these, and having a similar experience with Orange broadband, I was intrigued by Joe’s comment that you ‘kicked your Orange mobile contract to the kerb’. Did you manage to get out of your mobile contract before the end of 12 months? I’m 6 months into an 18 month contract, but would like to get out of it based on terrible broadband service (none at all in last 2 weeks). Just wondered if anyone has actually managed to do that??
Comment by Sarah Mooney — April 18, 2007 @ 10:38 am
i wish i had done my research and found this blog before agreeing for another 12 month contract at the end of march. since then the service has been utterly abysmal , resulting in me being totally disconnected for the past 5 days. i really have had it up to here with them - and i’m not normally an angry kind of person.
half tempted to hire a farmers muck spreader and head up to their corporate hq.
Comment by mister scruff — May 2, 2007 @ 3:01 pm
“Comment by Joe Dever ”
joe - how did you get out of your 12 month broadband contract with orange?
i cant get a mac code until i agree to pay up £230 (the amount for the next 11 or so months)… for a service that is non-existent!
Comment by mister scruff — May 2, 2007 @ 3:17 pm
All sounds very familure, I’ve just spent 4 hours on the phone to orange, NO JOY it’s BT’s fault, not ours, I was even asked by a so called customer services agent if I was reading from a script, when all I wanted was an answer to the question I asked 3hrs and 58 minutes previously, can you give me my MAC code and cancel my account. PLEASE DONT USE ORANGE
Comment by Charlie — May 5, 2007 @ 10:59 pm
Oh my, this is so familiar. Broadband from hell!!!!!!!!! After having no broadband for 6 weeks, i now have 1/4 meg speed. so slow you can actually see your hairs going grey while you wait! any faster and it drops out. I have 6 mths left on a lousy phone contract, signal weak in South London. Hate Orange so much. thinking of going virgin when contract up.
Comment by simon — July 7, 2007 @ 10:40 am
Hi dear all,I am a new fresh victim of Orange broadband I have also posted my suffer with Orange broadband which I am still waiting for their kindness to get me conected on www.http://www.orangeproblems.co.uk there are crowds of people speaking out against the Voted Worst ISP by BBC Watchdog.
I’ve never experienced such bad services both customer care and technical support until I signed up with Orange.
As I got attractive information from Orange shops, it was like you provide internet also 100 countries free phone call through the so-called Livebox. Then I signed up with Orange on 15th, Oct 2007.i received Livebox after one week but broadband never comes to me.
There were loads of calls to Orange broadband customer support but they never help me just keep telling to wait for another week and another week.
On Thursday 15th, Nov, I asked a day off from work, thinking I must sort my broadband problem out with Orange today so I was sitting down at my laptop and going to follow the advices from technical support team. However, I couldn’t hide my anger when the call ceter lady said again ‘…I don’t know what’s happened, could you call us back next Monday?.. I understand you but you need to call us back on next Monday …’. I admit that I was angry and no longer nice to call centre staff, I asked them to get me through to somewhere and somebody who can really doing something for me today. They finally gave me another no. which was a little bit more effective as I eventually got MS. Katherine from SPT team she promised me she would call my mobile on Monday about 4:30pm see what’s going on and she confirmed my mobile no. Funny story happened again, she never called me next day and up to now.
I am so tired to make any phonecall which is useless and expensive. I have had it enough, Please Orange, stop fooling your poor customers and keeping your promises. This is a big shame and funny story in Telecom industry.I have a feeling that Orange are also suffering technical problems themselves.I doubt Orange can really manage to do broadband marketing now and future.
Comment by feiyi — November 22, 2007 @ 7:58 am
Hi all, seems ridiculous doesn’t it? My partner has been with this broadband provider for years, I think it used to be FreeServe, then Wanadoo and now it should be USELESS!!! not Orange. We have recently moved house (kept the same phone number) we gave Orange 2 weeks notice of the move, fair enough they said they had noted it but couldn’t do anything until BT had sorted out the line change, but we should phone them as soon as it was done and it would only take a couple of days. This we did 15th November 2007. It is now 8th December and still no broadband?? they said it would be within 15 days, 18 days later we phoned them to see what was going on. They said that apparently something cancelled out something else 10 days ago, so unfortunately it is going to be another 10 days before we get internet!! They are totally useless. Why didn’t their system pick up the fault and notify us? Another thing is we still have to pay for not having broadband. I am really annoyed. When we asked how to cancel, it was going to cost us the £230. That is completely disgusting how can they justify it? if it was my account I would be telling them to stick their bloomin Livebox where the sun don’t shine and sue me… We will not be renewing the contract!!
Comment by Lushfee — December 9, 2007 @ 2:28 am