Orange

I live in London, zone 1, south kensington: don't ever sign a contract with these arrogant people.. they have been charging me for 4 months but never provided a service as they 'run out of capacity', so they asked me to wait 1 month to fix the problem, but they never did. I interrupted my contract but they want to charge me a 55£ cancellation fee! My internet connection has a steady download speed of 0.13Mbps! Their call centre is useless, they answer after 45 minutes in average when you call technical support, but answer immediately if you want to subscribe to their 'service'. you will be left alone without internet connection, and when you call them they'll keep you about 3 hours doing stupid things such as switching off and on the modem, even if you describe the problem in detail to them; you need to escalate your query to at least level 4 if you want to speak to somebody who actually understands something about a broadband link (and it will take you minimum 2 hours to get there ). They keep accepting customers without having capacity! They took 2 months to connect me when they promised to do it in 5 working days; they gave me 3Mbps for a few weeks at the beginning (while I had rights to interrupt my contract without penalties) and then they cut me down to 0.13Mbps permanently. Guys, don't do it. They have driven me mad all the times I called the customer centre, and their main objective when you call them is to hang out, with excuses such as "now i want you to watch the lights on your modem for 3 hours, and then ring me back", or "now you should do 3 speed tests in the next hour, and then ring me back". I HAVE INSTRUCTED MY LAWYER TO SUE THESE ********, IF ANYONE HAS SIMILAR PROBLEMS AND WANTS TO JOIN ME IN THIS, GET IN TOUCH.

I switched to Orange when ukonline were stopping their services. I didn't want Sky because I wanted to use my own router and my relatives have it and it's not very good at all at their end.
I went with Orange simply because they are cheap and they promised me a fast stable connection up to 10Mb/s, no traffic shaping, port blocking etc. Also I could use my own router, which was late December 2010. It seemed like an upgrade from my rock stable 2Mb/s (seemed like a business connection since ukonline stopped doing home broadband with free static ip I got by surprise) I happily had for years.
One week after my line was activated I noticed my speed test said I had 8Mb/s and my line rate was about 9Mb but when I do anything it drops to 6Mb/s or 2Mb/s even when downloading from a dedicated server in a data centre. I contacted Orange about the problem using the website saynoto8070 and spent months doing line tests and diagnostics.
They blamed my filter, rj-11 cable, router, master socket, etc. They even got me to buy replacements for those and connect to my test socket.
According to BT there was no problem with my line, but soon after they said they were upgrading a device at the exchange. Things started to work better after that... for 1 month then it all started to degrade again and I called yet again. During the time I was having problems I was told I would not be charged if I wanted to switch but now they are charging £70 and I would have to wait till August 2012 to avoid it.
BT Engineers had more knowledge of border gateway protocol then the Orange staff. If Orange couldn't fix my problem in 8 months I have no faith they will fix it now. Even when I called for a MAC I was on a long call being told the usual B/S and being treated like I refused to comply when I gave them close to a year to solve it. While on the call they themselves had issues with their own phone system to one another let alone know how to fix mine. Eventually connected to someone who said they would e-mail me my migration code in 2 weeks, every other isp I have been with (fs,wanadoo,tiscali,ukonline)was able to give me a MAC within 3 mins.

I would only recommend Orange if you’re very desperate or if you think your hard enough to take on their "support" staff.

Service: usual junk, used very little of it

Support: 0844 number, you spend pushing buttons for a min until you talk to anyone even if it's the wrong person, obvious lack of knowledge and tech skill.

Speed: fast speed (9Mb now) but very unstable and slowly getting worse every month.

Value: £15/month very cheap, but comes with expensive 0844 tech support and not much to support you with, expect dropped connections.

My line has been migrated from Orange LLU to WBC (BT offer I believe) in June 2011.
Before I was on 17 Mbit/s with a very good and stable service.My VPN was working fine.

Now my livebox displays 4 Mbit/s .... but I can hardly obtain 2 Mbit/s.
It seems speed is constantly reduced to 2Mbit/s.
The worst point is that VPN to the office works badly. At first (in June)I was left with 64kbps upstream and about 1 mbit/s downstream... on WBC.
my VPN to work was dead.

A few month later I have 2 Mbit/s .... but VPN works a little bit better ... but not like on good old LLU.

I am moving to another LLU provider.

I changed to Orange after being highly recommended by 2 family members and falling for the sales talk given to me by the orange sales team who promised the world and more. Now I could not only strangle the orange sales person but also my relatives. One thing I wasnt aware of before signing up was that it was an indian call centre, the indian call centre has had me pulling my hair out!

The Indian call centre will drive you mad, usually get about 5 hello's from the indian advisors before they start trying to guess what your saying and then hanging up on you! The UK "level 2" if you ever manage to negotiate the orange maze of customer support to speak with them never stick to what they promise, such as "I'll call you back". never happens.

I should also add it will take them 2 weeks to post me my mac code (never had this before, always got my mac code within 24 hours from previous isp's).

I have been with around 4 different isp's over the years and orange are by far the worst (even by talk talks standards). I'm now going to leave them before my contract is up and no doubt they will chase me for the cost of the remainder of the contract but for my own sanity I will have to go elsewhere.

AVOID ORANGE AT ALL COSTS!!!!!

Shocking as it may seem I've got absolutely no problems with Orange as an ISP.

Never bothered to review them but with the new update of the forum software etc thought why not.

So here goes...

Tech Support is diabolical unless you get through to Level 3 (in England somewhere) then it becomes very good. Only had cause to use it once and issue was sorted immediately. Admittedly I did bypass speaking to India but who wouldn't?

Product quality has been pretty good also.

Speeds have went up from a max of 512 that I could get on a long line to just over 4.5 Meg on 20CN WBC. (faster than the ADSL2+ LLU) As my line seems to have gone a marathon to get to the house the speed is pretty good.

No drop outs to speak of.

I am on a very old package so only pay £5 per month and it includes VOIP calls so I don't pay for calls to landlines.

I've known worse ISPs and I know some very good ISPs. Orange for me does what I want so don't see any point changing.

I can't comment on webspace or emails as I don't use them. The SMTP server has always been up and running as I use it for relay but that's about it.

My only Gripe is the blocking of inbound port 25. (This is why services rates a paltry 1)

Small additional...

recently my livebox died and as I use the second line (VOIP) needed new one. I know line fine btw. other router ok etc.

The Oversees callcentre people really make halfwits look clever. As their systems were down I tried my luck with a bombard of info as to prove beyond all doubt all I needed was new livebox.

Idiot wants to do line test as it's on his screen. Idiot doesn't listen.

Now here is the point I wanna make. As soon as they do something stupid. Say the service is not what you expected and you want to speak to a supervisor.

2 mins later I am told I will be sent new livebox.

So the moral of this story is that you can get what you want out of them but you have to push.