I've been with Waitrose for just over a week now, with about a two week lead in while I got my MAC from Orange (I signed up with Waitrose as soon as I had requested my MAC, in hindsight I should have waited for my MAC.)
I have various observations that I hope will be useful - some of these may well be of use for transferring to any ISP.
MAC code. When you register with Waitrose it asks for your MAC. It goes on to say that you can enter this at a later date if you've not already received it (the confirmation email I received also said this). This is not the case - you cannot enter it online once you have registered. I had to phone up. Not a great hardship but nonetheless.
Phone support - 0800 so is free :-) But customer services is not 24 hour. Tech support is (and is also 0800). As 0800 number this is no great hardship. Tech support couldn't take my MAC (see note above). To be honest I don't know that Orange's customer support is 24 hour either. In fact, I don't think they have anything that could fairly be called Customer Services :-P
Webmail - I got a confirmation email after registering (and paying a set up fee!) saying that my new Waitrose email address could be accessed as webmail. This did not work (I got a message saying something about not being able to use webmail with my type of connection). I contacted customer services and they presumably changed some setting or other as it started working after that.
I did not get an email saying when they estimated my connection would change over. My Orange connection just stopped working one day. I knew what my Waitrose email address was so took a guess that this was my username I needed for my Router. Fortunately it was and I was online in minutes. But had I not guessed this (or had my username been different to the email address, like it is with Orange) I would have been stuck. Once I was connected with them I got an email confirming the changeover had happened. A bit daft - an email beforehand would have been better! Especially in light of the fact that I had not been able to collect their emails by webmail (see previous point).
Email address - this is a bit of a problem. They advertise unlimited addresses, but as far as I can gather, these are unlimited ALIASES. Not quite the same thing. Your waitrose address takes the form of:
<username>@waitrose.com
and your aliases can take the form of:
<anything>@<username>.waitrose.com
You'll notice the alias above is the same format as Orange's addresses. However (and this has been a problem) you cannot enter the alias address in your POP3 settings. If you have more than one computer/account and wish to collect from different email addresses you're going to have problems. As you can only enter the generic "<username>@waitrose.com" address to collect from. If you enter "<anything>@<username>.waitrose.com" then it fails to recognise this. I have used message rules to get round this but it was a bit fiddly and isn't a perfect solution.
Other than that, rock solid connection all week (but in fairness I could go for weeks without Orange dropping completely). But no problems sending emails!!! That's been a breath of fresh air...
Their email support is pretty good. I had a few fiddly questions to start with and decided to email rather than phone - I didn't need answers straight away. Emails were answered within 24 hours, and on one occasion straight away afterwards when I replied with a follow-up question.
If I think of anything else - or there are any developments - I'll repost. Otherwise, no news is good news :-)
_________________ No longer an Orange customer. The future is bright once more :-)
Quick update to above. I posted in the General problems forum that Orange do not (seem to) monitor usage. I thought the five gig cap I had with Waitrose would be more than enough as Orange never contacted me to say I'd gone over their two gig cap.
How wrong I was... It turns out my family is averaging about 20 gigs a month (based on two week's usage - and I can't believe our usage has changed that much all of a sudden). This was going to be very expensive with Waitrose as they charge £2 a gig in excess. (In fairness to Orange their T&Cs say they'll merely contact you to discuss upgrading your package.)
I phoned Waitrose up this morning and they offered me their 'Broadband Plus' package. This is not advertised on their site. It is £28 pcm with a 20 gig cap and £2 a gig thereafter.
This is not a very good deal (BT Option 3 is £25 with no cap I believe) but given I am now contracted to Waitrose for 12 months I was not really in a position to negotiate.
However, I guess that Waitrose could have merely told me that it was tough luck as that was the deal I'd signed up to. So fair play to them for offering me a cheaper (if not market leading) alternative.
So my advice is to be very sure that you won't use the five gig cap. Orange do not offer a usage history (AFAIK) and don't contact you even if you are using ten times your two gig cap (not in my case they didn't), so hearing nothing from Orange is no indication of your usage.
_________________ No longer an Orange customer. The future is bright once more :-)
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