Someone who welcomes the rules is Mark Kowalski, of Queensway, West London, a 32-year-old architect who needs broadband to work from home outside office hours. Mr Kowalski and his flatmates decided to switch to BT after four months with no connection with Wanadoo, now Orange Broadband.

The company agreed to terminate the flatmates’ £20-a-month one-year contract after Mr Kowalski complained to Ofcom, but Wanadoo twice failed to supply a MAC code.

Kevin Ellis, who founded orangeproblems.co.uk after months of strife with the provider, operates an internet forum for disgruntled Orange customers. He says that the kind of problems that Mr Kowalski experienced remains commonplace, with 50p-a-minute calls to technical support lines par for the course.

One visitor to the Orange Problems website is Paul Pasquat, of Spreyton, Devon, who contacted Orange 63 times to report various connection problems. He applied Three times for a MAC code and each time the operator assured him that a code would be sent. No code arrived. Mr Pasquat says: “They are polite and useless.”

Under pressure from The Times, Orange has agreed to investigate both cases. The firm has now sent Mr Pasquat a MAC code and apologised for “any inconvenience”. It blamed the Three failed requests for the MAC code on “a clerical error”.