EE Reviews

I changed to Orange in 5 months ago and have gradually developed a deep and enduring hate for the entire company.

The one positive is a reasonable connection speed, however..

The equipment they provide does not work (at least the two liveboxes they sent me so far). Frequent network (wired and wireless) failures. Constant crashing requiring the livebox to be rebooted, at least once per day and a five minute plus restart time. Oh and complete failures requiring the whole thing to be reset at least once per week. Such that I have gone back to using my own netgear router which works perfectly. Which brings me to..

One of the main reasons for choosing Orange was the VOIP secondline service providing free OS calls (I am Australian and like to call home most days) , this has never worked for longer than two-three days at a time. Anyway this would only work with the livebox, which as already noted is a complete joke.

The technical support (obviously in India somewhere) is positively Kafkaesque in it's approach. Expect to spend at least 15mins on hold before you talk to anyone, a privilege charged at 5p/min. The first person you talk to will be completely unable to help you, but you can expect that they will waste at least another 15mins of your time as they make you restart and reset the router a few time, because obviously you didn't think of that yourself. They may at this point promise to call you back so you won't pay for the call. Do not be fooled, they will not call back! Finally you may make it through to level two of the system where you will have to go through the whole restart process again before the representative concedes that you do have the problem you say you do and concedes to try and fix it/ send out a new livebox. If like me you have a busy work life and don't want to spend your entire home time talking to unhelpful Indians you meet the final problem..

Customer service, Orange take the unusual approach of insulting you early. After having enough of paying for a service which simply dosn't work I called to cancel. I was, of course told I would need to pay out the rest of the contract. When I said I thought this was unreasonable considering that the service was not working I was told "Tough luck, you would need to have called technical support every 3-4 days over a thirty day period before you can get out early." I've not given up yet.

So please tell everyone you meet to beware.

Have been with these guys from day 1 - Freeserve, then Wanadoo, now Orange

Quite honestly until now everything has been pretty ok - ok, more like the devil you know, but good stability and non-LLU speed has been ok.

But more recently have fallen foul of their FUP, which as everyone knows, seems to be an arbitrary number that isn't documented anywhere on their site.

Well firstly the condecending language of their "customer services" letters was enough to make we want to leave straight off, but then they said I'd been a good boy and wouldn't be capped afterall. Unfortunately arrive home on Xmas eve to find that now capped at 512k in evenings because had used on average 7GB at peak time over previous 2 mth - 7GB on an unlimited plan, jeez !!!

Anyway needless to say I now have a MAC and actively seeking someone better - IDnet, Zen and Vivaciti look like the best bets, even though will be paying more.

Oh, and in case anyone still on Orange, DO NOT call their premium support lines, assuming you can even find a phone contact number on their website, which I couldn't. Not even on their "customer services" letters! Go to "saynoto0870.com" and use the 0800 number listed instead - got me straight thru.

Without warning, I am now capped at 0.5meg. Complete shambles of phone support in trying to resolve this.

Bitterly dissappointed, cant understand how they are still in business.

Unclear proposition which is knowingly misrepresented on the Orange website in my opinion.

Unlimited - means only as much as they will give you....5Gb monthly pittance policy - you go over, they slow your connection to 1/16th..old dial up speed, almost unusable.

If you have a family with more than one pc or gamers, I sugest you stay well clear.

Worst of it is that I cant get the cap lifted by paying more for using more!

Actually, this is a godsend as I have now found Zen, uk based isp with a 10x oranges download limit and its clearly shown on their website. Its more expensive but I am happy to pay for the premium service.

Goodbye Orange

This braodband supplier is unbelievable - I've never come accross such poor service in all my life and it hasn't improved in years - if anything it's got worse. My connection started to drop out quite a bit and I got the standard rubbish - call centre in India and barely able to understand what was said (this has improved a little) - and at premium charges too! The gist was that they blame everything from your wiring to their router - try all sorts of excuses and so-called 'test'the line (on an intermittent fault?). You then get passed around various departments all of them unhelpful in the extreme! One person says one thing which is contradicted by another and oh yes... don't forget the 'we will call you back within 48 hours' - this is OK if you are immortal and can wait to the end of the universe but otherwise it's more Orange flannel. The solution? well it was their routers/configuration miles away of course! This has happened to me 5 times so far so I'm changing ISPs - the latest wheeze is to really restrict those 0800 free numbers and to make sure you can't phone anyone senior in England to complain!
My advice? Avoid Orange as you would avoid a rabid dog! They are OK when things are running but as soon as there is a problem they will reduce your speed and make up all sorts of stories - you just have to keep on and on at them until the problem is resolved - this takes several weeks so be warned!
Many people have written about this - but Orange don't listen and have no idea about customer service - they just want your money!

Biggest mistake of .... your life!

*WARNING* DO NOT EVER GO WITH ORANGE
not even if they offer you free broadband with your mobile contract, put simply they are a complete waste of space.

Worst customer service in existence. Barely audible Indians who have no clue about broadband, pc's, or routers & just spiel off a appallingly inadequate script. They fail on an unmeasurable level. Like a bunch of retarded robots.

The ISP award for *INFINITY amounts of EPIC FAIL* goes to Orange.

Do NOT go there, your sanity depends on it.

Orange now have an appallingly small 5gb fair usage policy.

Basically if you have a couple of people in your house or use the internet for anything more than basic web browsing they'll cap your speed to 0.5mbps.

Really, if you actually use and value your internet connection DON'T sign up with Orange, you'll really regret it.

I have been an Orange Broadband customer for about four years. Their tec-support is in India and it is truly awful. My Livebox(broadband router) which they provided packed up and put a fault on my line which in turn knocked out my home alarm panel. Luckily I was able to trace the fault back to the Livebox. I phoned their tec people and they did not belive me that the box was faulty. Their solution was to send me a new RJ11 leed. I could go on, however the worst thing of all was that after enduring their awful service for such a long time they then charged me £28 disconnection fee on top of my monthly subscription to close my account.

Save yourself a world of hassle:

AVOID ORANGE BROADBAND AT ALL COST!!!!

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.