I've just brought a new house with my girlfriend. As my old isp (Be) don't yet do their 24Mb service here, and my girlfriend has 9 months of her 18 month phone and 8Meg broadband contract left, we got Orange to put a new line to the new house. She used to get about 4.5Mb down, and the new house is 75% closer to the exchange, so we thought that we'd be OK.
I've never been so wrong in my life. Orange told us it would take 7-10 days to move the phone and broadband. The phone took 31 days, and the broadband has just barely started working on day 41.
Orange claim that this is acceptable speed for 'up to 8Mb':
I've been promised a refund for our calls to customer service (over 15 hours of on-peak calls from mobiles on other networks), and we've been promised that we can leave Orange without paying off the contract, but given the huge list of lies that 'customer service' have told us so far, I'll believe this when I see it.
Editied highlights of my calls:
"we can't speak to the telephone engineers, they don't have telephones"
"your problem was resolved on the 13th" (on the 15th, from someone who had just spent 40 minutes confiring that I was getting no service)
"I can't call back, we don't have the facility to do that" (see the boxy thing with buttons on it? try picking it up, perssing the buttons and talking)
"you've been upgraded from 8Mb to 0.0Mb"
"nobody here works on a Saturday" (it was Saturday. I'm not sure if he was answering the phone for kicks in his spare time, or being honest about the quality of service he provided)
"BT cancelled your line" (I've had this one 3 times)
"Your existing old, low quality BT line is the problem" (it's a brand new house, at that time it had no a phone line!)
I'm on the phone to them now, taking these notes when on hold. "Debbie" says "Our fault system is down, call back in an hour, we might be able to do something then" - I can't tell if this is another lie, just a stalling technique to get me off the phone, or evidence that they can't even work their own fault management system so I ask to speak to her supervisor, then ask him the same questions, and surprise surprise Debbie was lying, their fault system is up, and has been all day. "Scott Charlton" the supervisor takes note of my formal complaint about this, and promises to call back within 2 hours (not the usual 'we can't make outgoing calls' lie, thank goodness).
I've been transferred to tech support, "Greg" is claiming max my line can support is 480kb/s, I repeatedly bring up the issue of this being a temporary cap down to 0.0, and the fact that my livebox is syncing at 4000, and he dithers between saying my line can support 480 and 1/2 meg. He keeps avoiding the question when I ask about the huge difference between my livebox sync speed of 4000 and my connection at 512 down/64 up. At least 3 other people told me this was a temporary cap while the max speed of the line was tested by BT, but aparrently Greg knows better. Transferring to his supervisor to check if the story matches... Phil Elsbury says "I cant understand this at all" (refreshing honesty, but coupled with his admission that he knows less technical stuff than Greg I have to wonder why he's in charge!) and puts me through to the escalation team....
Orange's terms and conditions say "Speeds vary significantly depending on line quality and distance from exchange." We've moved closer to the exchange we used to be connected to at 4.5 Mb to, so that only leaves the line - which is a brand new one that we've paid Orange to put in.
Of course Orange blame BT, and naturally I point out that if they decided to subcontract the work we are paying for to BT, then that's Orange's problem not ours.
Alexander from the escalations team says they could fix the slow speed by getting BT to do a "lift and shift" at the exchange, but as "it would cost several thousand pounds" he claimed repeatedly that "no provider would ever do this", and despite admitting that the line we've paid for isn't up to the standard of the old one, he's not going to pay for us to have the decent connection we are paying him for.
Of course this is just more rubbish from Orange, once I got off the phone I Googled for Broadband + "Lift and Shift" and surprise surprise even bargain basement ISPs like Tesco are prepared to do this "Lift and Shift". How dumb do Orange think we are?
Tomorrow I'll be trying to get hold of Alexander at the escalations team again, so I can call his bluff and get the required work underway, as well as making yet another formal complaint about yet another outright lie from Orange.
Alexander from the escalations team says they could fix the slow speed by getting BT to do a "lift and shift" at the exchange, but as "it would cost several thousand pounds"
God !...........their bo##ocks get bigger and bigger don't they ?
Email a complaint to Executive Office, copy in Tom Alexander and Mike Newnham. If you can't guess the email addresses then PM me.
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