We have held a freeserve dialup account for many years, subsequently upgraded to Anytime.
About two yeas ago my son took out a mobile phone contract with Orange, and decided to take advantage of their free broadband package. I wasn’t too happy about this, because I was intending to get broadband myself. However my son was planning to move away shortly, and said he would migrate to his new address. He was sent a speedtouch USB modem which he set up on his laptop. The other computers in the house continued to use dialup.
The new digs turned out to have a broadband connection anyway. So with my son’s permission I set up the speedtouch modem on my computer. In around October we received a letter from Orange saying that the Anytime service was about to close and that Orange would move us automatically to Broadband. I emailed Orange to say that our house already had a broadband connection, which we were using in conjunction with Anytime. I received an email in reply saying that it was possible to use dialup and broadband but not together. I thought this strange, since we were doing precisely that. About two months later we received a letter from Orange saying that they had tried to set up Broadband, but encountered a "problem" with the line! So, they had decided to keep on the dialup service for a while.
I started having problems with the speedtouch modem, so I bought a Belkin router and set up a wireless connection for my husband’s computer. The setup worked well for several months. Then in August my husband phoned Orange (there was no way, apparently, to do this online) to cancel the dialup. The Orange representative kept asking why he wanted to cancel, but he declined to give a reason.
On September 4th I received a phone call from someone at Orange Internet asking to speak to my husband. I said he had cancelled his account and the person rang off. One hour later our broadband connection went dead.
There followed a series of frustrating phone calls to Orange. At first they refused to speak to me, as I was not the broadband account holder, my son was. When my son rang Orange they told him that the account had been cancelled on 1st September – completely untrue. No one at Orange seemed to understand that although my husband had cancelled dialup Anytime, no one had cancelled Broadband. Eventually, after I had demanded an explanation (since they couldn’t apparently give one to my son) an Orange representative admitted to me that the broadband had been disconnected due to a “technical error” and that we would have to wait 10 days before re-registering. No one apologised, needless to say, but the gentleman thanked me for calling Orange! – reading from a script, I suppose.
Meanwhile, my son moved back home.
After ten days my son rang Orange and requested they reinstate his broadband which was supposedly included in his mobile phone contract. This time Orange told him that his broadband would be reconnected in about a week’s time, and that he could keep his old password. A few days later a Siemens router arrived, with an accompanying letter giving him a new user name. The letter also told him to expect confirmation that his home phone was to be moved to Orange (?) and to expect a text message when the line was active.
Yesterday 23rd September he got a text from Orange saying that the broadband was now active. So I tried to reconnect using my Belkin Router – without success, since Orange rejected the user name and password. I tried entering my son’s old details, but to no avail.
Last night I received a phone call from Orange, again asking to speak to my husband. I said that my broadband had been cut off. It was only afterwards that the penny dropped – they were trying to sell us a new package! Anyway the man referred me to his “colleague” who told me we had been disconnected because I had set up a Belkin Router, apparently I *have* to use the Orange modem and the Orange setup software for Orange broadband to work! When I said that the user name and password were being rejected the man from Orange told me to use our old Freeserve name – even though we had closed the account. I followed all these instructions, but inevitably, nothing works.
At the moment I am using payg mobile internet from 3.
Orange fail to understand how there can be two accounts (and two account holders) in the same house. Also the advice they keep giving me is patent claptrap.
The only lesson I can glean from all this is, don’t let your son mess with Orange!
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