ISP Reviews by bill_3000

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.