EE Reviews

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.

I am leaving Orange after five years of mediocre service and Imaginative invoicing. There was always 'extras' on my monthly bill. A couple of quid here, a fiver there, not enough to put myself through the torture of calling them to ask why...? you can imagine the agro this would generate... Name - password- mum's maiden name, and all that Jazz Please hold, while I am forced to listen to some prat and his guitar. Back off hold - struggle to understand some guy from the Punjab trying to speak English (Always very polite though) But enough is enough, bye bye Orange.

Hopefully my tale of woe will disuade anyone to sign up to this frankly farce of a service.

In short, ive been with Orange for 3 years now, had a steady 2.5mb connection ( I live in Milton Keynes, thats average), everything was fine (apart from 3 replacement Liveboxes, gave up in the end and bought my own router)

Three months ago orange decomissioned it’s own LLU and moved over to BT, since then my loop attentuation shot up and my SNL dropped down, my connection speed varied between 400kb and 1.4mb.

I have spent the past 3 months trying to get someone to even acknowledge the problem, 3 months of going round in circles, talking to a call centre who block any attempt to get 3rd tier support and have an obsession with micro filters, a web team who i can only percieve to be a tribe of long lost apes who have developed opposable thumbs and use this ability to press “Cntrl C and Cntrl V”.

The only time i spoke to anyone with any understanding of anything more technical than power cycling was after i rang to get my MAC code, and even them he didn’t ring back as promised.

So be warned , if you need any support thats anymore technical than turning it off and on again, your absolutly screwed, They wont even acknowedge an issue. In fact since i thing since there migration i just think want to wipe there hands of anything technical and just take your money.

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!!!!!

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 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.

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 BASTARDS, IF ANYONE HAS SIMILAR PROBLEMS AND WANTS TO JOIN ME IN THIS, GET IN TOUCH.

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.

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.

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?