Origin Broadband Reviews

..Ah, you'd mean the hassle and poor customer service then?

Not really in the habit of online reviews but I thought I should share my experiences of moving to Origin.

A shame really, as this could be a really, really good ISP. The network is stable and very fast from what I have seen to date - I am getting in the region of 2x download speed from previous ISP over the same pair of wires. Plus the techy guys - when you can make it through the endurance test of the queuing / endless MOH loop of 'We Built This City On Rock 'N' Roll' - are friendly, helpful and know their stuff.

But in terms of organisation, efficiency and general Customer Service, I'm afraid to say this ISP needs a real kick up the backside.

Porting 2 x DSL / phone lines (two properties) from two previous ISPs here is what happened"

Port 1
From BT
Router sent to wrong postal address, I had to figure out what to do myself with ParcelForce to actually get the box. Router was part-configured, but luckily as I'm a network engineer by trade I filled in the blanks and checked my config with Origin's techs. NB the guide on the website for help with this was written for a different ASUS router and was no help.
After that - plugged in and cutover went a-OK for both broadband and phone.

Port 2
From Plusnet
BB cutover went great, saw my Plusnet router go down and plugged in the Origin one. Straight up, great. Noticed that my phone line was now NU when dialling it and phoned Origin - 'completely normal, takes a couple of days to swing, check then'. Did this, time and time again over the last month and made numerous calls to Origin to find out what had happened to my number. *Every* call I was promised back (within 48 hours for manager call back) never happened. I finally got told after nearly a month that my old number has now been taken by another provider so I cant get it back. Nice. After more arguing and not getting any call back I've given up and accepted a paltry 1 month free line rental as some sort of recompense - life is too short.

So on the tech side, looks good and in terms of MBits/Sec per ££ they are way cheaper than the competition. But you only have to hear the resignation in their call centre agents' voices to realise that they'd appear to be dealing with similar issues en masse. If you want an ISP that at least pretends to care about their customers, look elsewhere. If you are tech-savvy and accept the risk that you're going to lose a few hours of your time on the planet then look no further.

Dissatisfied from all points of view. Internet speeds are the lowest of all providers I have had in the 4 years I have lived in this flat. When I call Origin I have to wait ages on the phone. Once I get through to someone they pass me from one department to another and nobody seems to know anything. Managers are never available to take my calls.
Switching to Origin was a mistake, one I hope not many others will make. Avoid avoid avoid!

I'm not usually one for reviews but Origin Broadband have been so useless I feel I have to do something to stop other people making the same mistake.

I joined up with them a few years ago and the fibre install back then wasn't actually too bad, although I was put on the wrong speed profile so I was getting 38mbps instead of the 76mbps I was paying for - a few calls to customer service and it eventually got sorted. And service since then was pretty good (I think I was on a PlusNet line resold as Origin).

Back to more recently. I've just moved house so I called to let them know, they said that wouldn't be a problem but I'd have to start a new 18 month contract. Not ideal but OK. Took about 3 weeks for my install date.

Found out quickly I've been put on the wrong speed profile AGAIN (38 instead of 76). The customer service now takes at least 30 minutes, sometimes up to hour to get through to, along with the same 3 awful hold music songs. It's been over a month now and multiple calls to Origin and the speed problem still isn't sorted.

I've literally just seen my bank statements and I'm still being charged for the account at my old house! Another 30 minute+ phone call to Origin and they've promised they've cancelled the other account and a refund is on the way but I'm not all that hopeful.

Seriously, go with someone else, anyone else. There was a time I would've recommended them but they've gone properly downhill in the last couple of years.

Moved to Origin from Plusnet, as it was much cheaper.
Paid up-front for 18 months 80/20 unlimited, with £1.49 extra PM for a fixed IP, also £38.50 cashback from Quidco.

1) After sign-up, received the expected welcome email
2) Plusnet wrote to give me a switch-over date
3) Origin sent a reasonable Asus router to me, pre-programmed with the PPPoE username. Inside the box was the username and password on a sticky label, but no other documentation.
4) 8am on switch-over day, I plugged in the Asus router. Very pleased to see that the internet appeared to work.
5) That evening, replaced the Asus router with my Draytek router, and found that I was sharing an IP with other users, and could not SSH back in to my home network - this is exactly the same bug described in chaser2001's review.
6) I had a terrible experience waiting for support on the phone; half an hour waiting for 1st line support, then an hour waiting for level 2, at which point I gave up.
7) To get the problem resolved, I messaged Origins social media accounts with a long fault description.
After two days, they fixed the issue and emailed me.
8) Again, as described by chaser2001, I had a few days of routing problems - iplayer was not accessible. I worked around this using a VPN, Thankfully the problem was fixed without me needing to contact support.
9) I still can't login to the Origin customer portal - the password reset page appears to work, except that after setting a new password, it then gets rejected.
Not sure what is on the Customer Portal - so don't know what I am missing!
10) Speed is fine - almost as good as Plusnet. Ookla over the past few days has consistently hit 32Mbs/18Mbs/18ms with a VDSL2 of 79751Kbps/19999Kbps.

Overall:
It's a shame that Origin didn't set things up right to begin with, and their support really needs to improve. However now it's working, I'm a very happy bunny. Fingers crossed it's keeps working...!

If your tech savy, and don't get too stressed waiting on the phone, I'd say go for it...

Hi
I had similar issues to Brian Logan, below with Origin, start up was ridiculous, everything went wrong, it was my fault, BT fault everybodies fault bar theirs.
1) Line and broadband was delayed for 10-14 days but charged, despite them saying it wouldnt be.
2) Fibre was slower than the speed of previous ADSL.
3) they gave me a new number which was same as local junior school, when I got home at night my answer machine was full of messages about kids being abcent that day.
4) BT engineer sent out to resolve missed first two appointments despite me waiting in al day..
but Brian, if you can stick with it- my fibre is now sorted, all working 100% at good price - but took 2 months to sort out.
Edit: I have now lewft Origin due to their inability to to do anything they say they will, guess what happens next - they send me an an email with my final bill - do they tell me how much or when coming out, no they tell me to log into my portal to see, will this be the same portal that nobody has been able to log into for months?
you guys are so bad its untrue
Roy

So, another one who doesn't normally write reviews, but thought my experiences would be worth sharing.

Summary is that I've been with Origin now for about a month, and had a few early teething problems. However, once I got through to the correct support level I have found them very helpful and so far all my issues have been resolved.

The detail is:

I had ordered 40/10 fibre with static ip address and callerid from Origin. All was prepaid. I was switching from Plusnet because they could no longer offer a decent upload speed with a 40gig download.

On switchover day I noticed that I had lost access to certain servers on my system. Turns out I had been provided with a private IP address and was sharing public IP address with other Origin users. Whilst the private IP address may well have been 'static' this was most definitely not what I had expected. A call to Origin, and escalation to their network team, and this was sorted the next day. Static public IP address was now assigned. Access to my servers was regained.

I then discovered (as others have) that there was no email server service provided. An inconvenience, but I was able to work around that. I guess you get what you pay for.

Next observation was that callerid was not working. Another call to support and this was fixed. A bit of a problem with this initially, as I was offered this as a 'freebie' over the phone if I prepaid for the line rental / internet service. I duly prepaid, but no record of my freebie callerid was on their system. My word was accepted, and callerid was implemented.

Next observation was that upload / download speed was dreadful during peak periods. Before getting the chance to call to report this problem, I then ran into more significant problems with inability to access certain web sites. I initially thought this was a DNS problem, and hoped it would sort itself out in time, but it didn't. So another call to support. This time I struggled to get past first line support (they were trying to tell me I had a firewall problem!), but after much debate, the call got escalated. Was then told it was a problem that would need to be addressed by the network team and they don't work weekends. They would call me back on Monday. On Tuesday, I called them. Got through to the network team. Was told that work had been done at the weekend to servers to try and better balance loads. The tech guy then made a configuration change, and immediately my connection was working much better. I can once again access all sites, and speed is no longer dropping off at peak periods.

In conclusion:
* Support calls take far too long to answer. Even once you've through to someone, if the call then needs to be transferred, be prepared to wait an age again. On average I've probably had to wait about 1 hr before a call is picked up.
* If you're not a bit tech savvy, then you might struggle to get through to the right person to help diagnose and fix the problem.
* When I have been able to talk to someone, the staff have always been very helpful and very courteous.
* All problems have been resolved to my satisfaction

I understand some compromises must be accepted with a lower price service. With that in mind, overall, I am actually quite happy with the service Origin have provided me.

It hasn't started well. Origin failed to provide me with network login details to enter in my own router, so, the first phone call started at 0920 on day one and I gave up about 45 minutes later.
The second call got me to a person moderately quickly, however, my need for two simple pieces of information wasn't something they could deal with, so they said they'd put me through to someone who could. At this point I explained that I'd already been an a queue for over 40 minutes before and wasn't very inclined to do that again. I was informed that I'd be put straight through to someone .....40 more minutes later I decided that hadn't really worked out how I'd intended it to so I hung up again in need of lunch.
Lunch eaten, I scored a success and got through to someone who was able to immediately offer up the required details and off I went.
Scroll forward to mid afternoon and I've moved on to reconfiguring my email client, MS Outlook, and I realise that I need Origin's mail server addresses and some login details.
Another couple of 40+ minute sessions on hold and, Ah!, it seems that Origin doesn't offer email services to residential customers ...WTF?
No mention of this universally supplied service in any of their advertising, every other ISP with which I've done business with since 1996 has offered email. Weak excuses about residential customers having been involved in spam operations were given as reasons for not doing so - everyone else manages to do this Origin. Sure it's something I can work around but I'd have liked to know about it rather than have it unexpectedly dropped on me.

Things to fix:
1 - Better customer communication required prior to go-live.
2 - Need to make it clear that email isn't a part of the package.
3 - Less compartmentalisation; more people need to be able to issue things like network login details.
4 - More bums required on seats in the support team, having customers endlessly hanging on for someone to answer the phone is plain wrong. At least it's an 0800 number!

Two months after taking the initial order and £180 in upfront fees, I am:
* without broadband from my old provider (because Origin gave them notice),
* without broadband from the new provider
After repeatedly chasing (and now complaining) to them over tha last 2 months the answer has only been:
"We have no idea when your broadband will be set up"

Beware at all costs unless of course your feeling like a long fight.

this is one of those disaster reviews but these people are utter clowns and need to be called out for their total incompetence. I switched from BT in a 12 month, paid upfront, deal including line rental that worked out less than a third of my BT monthly bill. Happy days. Sadly, it was too good to be true. I have poor phone signal at my property so landline phone and Broadband is fairly important to my family. Here is my cautionary tale....
order process seemed simple enough, when ordering I declined their router (BT home hub I already had is a good piece of kit), got to switchover date, low and behold, no ADSL connection. thinking this was my router, I spent much time retrying router config). Nothing. I then spent many hours on hold (average time to get through was around 70 minutes - on many occasions I gave up a round the hour mark - if you go with them and need to call them you will get to know the 4 songs they have on the hold music VERY well and Bryan Blessed telling you they've had better days.
When I did get through they advised that they do operate 24 hours and I should try calling before 8AM or after 8PM. Thanks, so that'll be when I'm trying to get my infant daughter ready for nursery or trying to relax with my wife.
Following them deciding it was my router that was at fault after about 2 minutes on the phone to tech support and then the tech guy offering to send one of their routers "preconfigured" next biz day, I was happy. 2 days later no router. Cue a 7AM call and only 15 minute wait this time to learn no record of my tech support call and no router order raised and that they would now raise an order for a new router. router arrives next day. It is a piece of junk compared to the bB one, only 2.4Ghz (no 5) and certainly not preconfigured. But no joy. Cue another tech support call/hell wait. They then have me on my hands and knees with a screwdriver dismantling the BT wall socket to try and test the router on the BT test line that is hidden behind. Nothing. They decide now is the time to get BT Openreach involved. (Origin actually buy their carrier service from Vodafone so there are three parties in this supplier relationship - alarm bell should be ringing) anyway now BT Openreach are involved more time passes.... a week later (and a day off work) an Openreach engineer arrives. after a while at the box up the road he comes back to say "yeah, someone forgot to plug something in, they should have been able to see this remotely." Great.
Now have ADSL light on (nearly a month without any service by this point) I then configured the router to only receive exactly half the download speed I had with BT (6Mb vs 12 with BT, of up to 17 advertised) and a quarter of the upload speed (0.25Mb vs 1Mb with BT). I also get frequent service interruption and downtime.
I've raised a compliant weeks ago but no response.
In short, this is a hard lesson in You Get What You Pay For. I wouldn't wish Origin Broadband on my worst enemy. I suggest you stick with the big boys, pay a few pounds a month extra and get a decent service. I am counting down the days until I can get back to BT/Virgin/Sky

I don't normally take the time to leave reviews, but this awful company has left me with no choice. I have been with many different internet service providers and unfortunately ended up choosing Origin because of their low price for fibre-optic broadband. Worst decision I've ever made! I would hardly ever have a smooth connection (my location and wiring etc. has never had any problems before) that would last more than half an hour. Even when I did manage to get internet access, the speed was horrendously low. My package was fibre-optic broadband 'with up to 38mbps'. The reality was that when I did have internet access, I would receive around 0.5 upload speed and 4-5 download speed.... absolute scam!!! They never charge you the correct figure you sign up with initially, they overcharge you each month (roughly add on random costs of £5-£10). Don't expect them to ever answer any of your calls either, I would usually have to hang around for 30-45 mins each time only to get fed up and end the call...