EE Reviews

Shocking speed, shocking service. Counting the days until my contract is up.

Bring back Sky / plusnet - all is forgiven.

I could not give a zero score otherwise I would have done. Don't fall for the cash offers - look elsewhere..

Best dash, off to phone India again about my speed, paying for 38 and getting 15...

nice

I moved to EE from O2's Home Broadband, which I had been very happy with. O2 was switching to Sky, and as I wanted to upgrade to a fibre connection it seemed like a good time.

I was tempted by EE primarily due to their low price (at the time) to other fibre connections.

Bad move!

Firstly, I was charged a £50 connection fee, when it was supposed to be free. They apparently couldn't refund me, all they could do was to reduce my next two bills accordingly. Never mind I hadn't budgeted for an extra £50 to come out that month!

Then, the connection. Well, frankly it's rubbish. Constant disoonnections. Downloads and video streaming stopping partway through for no good reason.

Want to do online gaming? Good luck. Occasionally you'll get a session where you can play without lagging out the entire game for you and the other players. That's if it doesn't disconnect for no good reason.

Want to use P2P technology for anything? No chance if it's during peak hours, as due to EE's traffic shaping, you'll get download speeds of 0.5kb per second.

Not to mention, tech support is based abroad and is frankly hopeless. If their script doesn't allow for your issue, then you have no chance of getting it resolved.

Due to the issues I've had, EE have given me my MAC code and allowed me to disconnect without the usual fee only 9 months into my contract with them (18 month contract). In fact, giving me my MAC code is the only thing they've managed to do without any hassle or errors.

EE is a terrible ISP. Avoid at all costs.

Having been another of the BE there punters who didn't want to end up with Murdoch wares. I went with a cheap deal with my mobile provider and oh my had a I wished I had not!

The initial service was ok. Varying pings and speeds, but it was relatively stable for the first couple of months.

I then reported a drop in upload speed to 0.02mbs
I then went through around 20/30 tech support people who just washed themselves of the problem trying to say 'We don't support upload speed'

Horrendous tech support, weeks wasted with script led idiots.
Attrocious Customer service, wasted days trying to log complaints, only to get passed back to a tech support idiot.
Unusable complaints department. Having given up trying to have a telephone conversation with Complaints. I emailed in through the website. Got the obligatory Automated response of a call back within 48hours and 2 weeks later am still awaiting that call. Have logged subsequent complaints and also had no response.
Emailed Ofcom and emailed the cancellations department, I recieved a call the same day and having berated the tech support so much, I was given waiver of all disconnections fee's, given a MAC code and left them IMMEDIATELY!

I wanted to become an EE customer almost three months ago and went to an EE shop. This happened after I moved into my new home with no previous contract. Pretty clean sheet to start with (you would hope).

I bought the 30MB Fibre deal with All inclusive calls and extra mobile internet capacity for the mobile contract.

They setup my mobile account without any problem. However, my fibre connection turned into a real nightmare.

First, they gave me a date for an engineer visit two months after I purchased the deal. On the day of the engineer visit, nobody turned up and nobody bothered to call me.

I called them after 6:30 pm (which was the time I was supposed to wait until the engineer comes) and they told me that I should call the next day to set up a new day. I was already frustrated that I didn't have any internet connection for two months and now I was going to wait even longer.

Anyway, the next day they told me that the earliest the engineer can come was 2nd of January, 2014 (Today!!). I didn't do any holiday plans so that the internet can be setup as early as possible and accepted the date.

Today, I gave a call to EE in the morning to see if everything was allright. They told me that the engineer is NOT booked for today and there is no record of any appointments being setup!!!

After three months I am still without landline and home broadband and continue to use my neighbour's access (many thanks Gaurav!!).

I cancelled my order and am looking for a new deal now. Not from EE!!!

My mobile contract was going to benefit from an extra 20GB of internet data capacity due to fibre purchase and I am left with a mobile deal with less-than-enough data.

The people working in the customer services were kind but didn't help at all to reduce my frustration.

Sorry EE, but you need a lot of improvement to be customer-worthy.

Never had a single problem, at all!! when I was using Orange free(yes free) broadband service married up to my two mobile phone contracts. They were brilliant. Why the hell did I leave them. Of course not sure what EE is like now.

Been having problems with EE/Orange for years. Atm, i am apparently in the 10 day BT line reset period and my speed started off at 2.8mbps and has gradually decreased to the 0.7 mbps that I am now receiving. EE have been most unhelpful, fobbing me off with ******** at every opportunity, as I call them regularly due to a constantly fluctuating speed which is usually below 1mb for the whole time I have used this company as my ISP. Surely I am receiving internet speeds below their contractual minimum and am entitled to terminate my contract and expect compensation for paying for a service I do not receive. I will wait for the ******** 10 day line stabilization period to finish and then demand my contract to be terminated if my optimum speed of 8mb is nowhere near reached.

I have just completed a year's contract with Orange Home Broadband (7Mbps ADSL), originally in Westminster and then moved mid-way through to Aberdeen. Actual download speed achieved has been a maximum of 3.5Mbps.

Summary - Good
Overall, I did manage to get access to the internet for a lot of the time I was with Orange. The tariff was reasonable at the time of signing up.

Summary - Bad Points
At no point would I rate the quality of the connection as excellent. The house move was a disaster. There have been technical problems that I have had to research and fix myself. Tech Support / Customer service have been courteous and friendly, but there are severe competence issues.

Chronological Log of contact with Orange:
Oct 11: Set up broadband after a mis-selling debacle with BT. Set up goes efficiently and broadband works OK.

Apr 12: I find out I'm moving to Aberdeen with my job in a month. Contact Orange to notify them and arrange home move. Told to call back again one week before move. The dicking-about period begins.

Jun 12: After dozens of phone calls, an engineer appointment is arranged at a very inconvenient time, leaving me without internet for another fortnight. "The next one we can book is in 2 weeks" - could have been arranged when I called in April/May. Engineer fails to show at first appointment. Another 2 weeks, more phone calls, and finally the line is set up. Orange award 2 months free by way of compensation (only after a severe dressing-down over the phone).

Jul 12: After more phone calls (all costing money) and still no internet, Orange finally BEGIN their house-move process.

Aug 12: Internet is extremely tempramental and unreliable - worse than the days of a 56k Modem line. Tech support tell me to switch router off and on again. I google the problem and adjust router settings to fix it myself. Reliability problems solved but bandwidth remains poor (Skype video calls remain impossible).

Oct 12: Contract finally finished, Orange retention team did offer 2 months free as an incentive to stay, which I declined. The MAC Code has taken over a week and is yet to arrive by post, but has been read out to me over the phone. Have now ordered a switch over to Xilo, saving £2/mth and [potentially] quadrupling bandwidth. Should have visited this website (ISPreview) a year ago. I hold MoneySuperMarket.com responsible for the poor recommendation.

For many weeks now, I have been unable to even stream a Youtube Video, at peak times.

After the usual checks, Orange have confirmed that the problem is due to heavy traffic.

I have paid Orange for a Wireless service.
I have paid them for Speedtouch wireless adaptors, a wireless router etc, yet the only solution they can offer is to 'try it wired!'

I've had many problems with Orange.

They are an atrocious company, only interested in throwing out the net, and taking on as many new customers as they can, and then not providing anywhere near satisfactory levels of service.

It seems we just have to accept this theft.

Because Our Governmnet are completely useless, and have failed to regulate these companies properly.

And who can afford to take a multi billion company to court for not providing the service we are paying for?

In all the years I've been using broadband, I've never experienced such a terrible product.

Poor tech help
My experiences are the same as other criticisms people have made of their customer service and tech help. most people I spoke to at Orange had little to no technical knowledge. They sound like lay people who've been given a list of scripted answers to common problems, so they end up not really understanding the issues and asking you to reboot your router for what ever probelm you may describe...

Customer Service,
Arrogant, rude, and unhelpful. Offered me discount incentives to connect, and further incentives to stay when I my service took too long to get up and running. I got it in writing but they're refusing to pay some of the discounts/incentives.

Product Quality in general...
*I've tested my through put speed as being 6 mbits/sec... so you would expect a reasonable albeit not super fast speed
*Youtube (and streaming video) I can't buffer a youtube video even in low quality so I've given up on youtube at home. Rarely buffers past a few seconds).
*iPlayer via bbc's website cannot stream a single low quality video, the message I get on the bbc web site tells me that the bbc iplayer service is not supported by my provider.
*skype, can't even voice only skype, skype tells me that there is insufficient bandwidth... Orange tech support tell me that they do not 'support' skype as it messes with their network...

It seems like Orange have extremely harsh bandwidth throttling on many services/ports. Any data/media heavy internet usage rarely works, and in rare moments it does so only very briefly.

Tried to download the latest Ubunto iso via a torrent, 700mbs, took a week of having my machine runing constantly... a friend on same exchange in london with a different isp downloaded the same torrent in 5 minutes, his line through put has been tested at 8 mbits...

Can't download any other software and patches or large files as they rarely can complete without stalling... on a couple of occasions have been able to download 50+ mbs of data in one go....

I'm not a heavy user but these days the internet is very media heavy and large data transfers are a standard practice.

Even my email client often can't download all my email in one go.

Can't load mutliple web pages with out several returning can connect messages.

Orange support have after numerous calls told me that there is no problem with my router or line, suggesting its a problem with my computer. I have the same problem with all 3 of my machines on 3 different versions of windows and unbuntu. My main laptop doesn't seem to have any of these troubles when connected to a friend's network, but then he's not with Orange!!

My suggestion is that if you are a light email user that doesn't browser much and then mostly text pages with no to little embeded media, then Orange may be ok, but even so I wouldn't recommend them on the apalling customer service and tech help.

Avoid this company at all costs. I can't imagine anyhting they have that makes it worth the trouble and headache of dealing with them.

Their broadband servies is so cripled by their restrictions that its mostly useless for modern internet usage. Its not worth it at any cost.

Orange supplied us with a mediocre broadband connection and a cheap router with poor wireless signal.

When their customer service (and I use that phrase in the purely nominal sense) team screwed up a migration to a new phone line, I cancelled the contract. Now with Xilo.

They were very cheap, but you always get what you pay for.

I've had a few ISPs, Orange was the worst.