I too have been with Orange since days of freeserve/ wanadoo. Started with dial up and progressed through the packages now on the broadband Max product. I find them extremely good value. We were LLUed 2 days ago and apart from very minor hiccup with mail everything is working perfectly.
Seems to me every Isp has its faults and every Isp has its customers ready to complain. Just that the happy ones (in the majority) don't let everyone else know!!!
Joined: 16 Dec 2006Posts: 108Location: North Essex
I too have been a lucky long-term customer (he said, touching wood fast), and the package I'm on is good value and meets my needs.
However, the fact remains that Orange are abysmal when it comes to customer support, and are, at the very least, guilty of sharp practice through some of their sales techniques. They are also bordering on the incompetent when it comes to technical support - and I'm probably being generous with my use of the word "bordering".
I'm not making these claims based only on what I've read here and on newsgroups, although what I've come across ties in precisely with what I've found elsewhere. I've recommended Orange to a friend and to my parents in the past, and would not do so again now. In the case of my friend, she was simply never connected; other ISPs websites said that her line was not compatible with ADSL because of DACS, but Orange claimed it was okay. She went for it, and didn't get a service. She was charged for several months, naturally, and had a huge (and expensive) fight to get her money back. Orange never did acknowledge the problem, although their line checker also recognised there was a problem soon after she was connected - and whilst they were still claiming that she should have been paying them!
My parents are still on the old "Unlimited" package, and wish to remain on this because they qualify for free calls to Turkey, which have been dropped on Home Max. I'd told them to absolutely, categorically tell any Orange telesales oik to shove off if they tried to persuade them to switch, and this is what they (politely) did when one did try. However, said salesperson was persistent, and told them that she'd reduce the cost of their package by £2, but that they'd retain the "100 countries" deal. Naturally, this proved not to be the case - they were immediately charged for calls to Turkey. There then ensued a month or two of phoning Orange, writing to Orange, which not only had no effect, but which elicited responses ranging from, "Phone this number and tell them you need to be put back on your old package; quote me because I'm important", to "We can't access your account details", to "We didn't know you had a problem..." Finally, the ISPA seem to have sorted it out, although their promised credit still hasn't materialised.
Now, it's perfectly possible to rub your chin wisely and say, "Ah, well, you shouldn't have agreed to that". However, the inescapable fact is that these people are utterly incompetent, or worse. And it's also perfectly possible to say that you've had a good service; so have I, and so, I suspect, have countless others. I've been lucky, because I've never needed to phone their customer support line - I live in dread of ever having to do so.
We all put up with a service which regularly causes problems - look at the DNS problems a couple of weeks back! I haven't used Orange's email service for four years, except to retrieve their own account messages (which means I have to download 200 spam messages per day for one or two valid messages per month), because it's wildly unreliable.
I'm sorry, but the best that can be said for Orange is that it's just, barely okay if nothing goes wrong. No better, in my view.
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