Joined: 23 Jul 2007Posts: 1Location: Newcastle upon Tyne
First post here but I thought I'd share a success story and try to spread some hope!
My family have been with Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange internet for a long time and never had any problems so when my Mum renewed her phone contract in march she decided to pay the bit extra and go for the 8MB internet package as well.
Since day 1 we hadn't been getting any speeds over 0.5MB so my Mum called Orange and asked why we were paying for a service we weren't getting. After several days/weeks of phone calls, line checks and the usual we were told that we weren't able to get faster then that at the moment on our exchange but that an upgrade was due to be happening there in the next few months. We were given the option of keep paying for the 8MB and get the service as soon as the exchange was upgraded or drop back down to the basic package and have to wait for some time afterwards to be upgraded. We decided to keep paying and get upgraded sooner.
Well, 4 months down the line and the speeds hadn't improved. We went through a really slow period in May (the same as everyone else) where it would have been faster just to have a normal dial-up connection. This was particularly frustrating for me as I'm at university studying Web Design and all my assignments were due in that month. After the speeds picked back up to 0.5MB, I looked at the stats from the livebox and found out that our potential attainable speed was about 6.5MB - significantly faster then we were getting!
On Tuesday my Mum phoned Orange to ask them why our speed had been capped and we weren't getting the service we were paying for. After a several hours of being passed from department to department and trying to get the people at Orange to understand that the problem was not with BT and that our line was perfectly fine and then another 30 minutes trying to explain to the guy in India that the problem wasn't our speed was 8MB and we didn't want it (!?), my Mum eventually got put through to a call centre in England. By the sound of the guy's accent, I would say he was from 'Boro. Thankfully this guy (called Daniel I believe) was very helpful and actually seemed to know what he was doing. He looked all the details of the account up and checked everything over and then told my Mum there was absolutely no reason why we shouldn't have been put on the faster speeds from March since our line was capable of it all along! He apologised profusely and admitted it was all Orange's fault and upgraded us to the faster speed straight away and without a new contract.
Within a few hours (or maybe minutes - we'd all gone out shopping for a bit) our connection jumped from 0.5MB to a whopping 6.5MB which caused me (as the one who discovered this) to go racing through the house to tell anyone I could find! Down to about 4.5MB at the moment - I'm guessing because they're still checking what our line can handle and stay stable.
Not sure if the people who work at Orange are just particularly badly trained or if they'd been lying to us consistently for the past 5 months but I'm just thankful to be getting a faster speed now and want to tell people not to give up! Turns out if you complain enough your speed can magically improve in a matter of hours.
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