A customer of mine used Orange happily (despite the fact that they had her on a fixed 576Kbps connection when she could have had about 1.7Mbps) until an Orange network upheaval after which she was off the air. Extensive tests indicated the fault at or onwards from the telephone exchange. The 1st-line Orange support people were infuriating but after several days of irritating them, they agreed to send out a BT engineer. The BT engineer found that there was a fault somewhere on their network and made a report. Nothing happened. Called Orange again (always had to talk to the highly non-technical 1st-line support people first) to find out what was happening and were told that the BT engineer reported no fault! WHAT??!! I think what he meant was that there was no fault WITH THE LINE OR HOUSE WIRING you imbeciles!

After several days more of completely inconclusive phone calls where polite Asian people assured us that everything possible was being done while there remained absolutely no improvement, the customer asked for a MAC and called Vispa. They had to sort out the problem (some issue in the BT Radius server) but it only took a day or two after they took over the line.

So well done Orange! This was a great lesson in how to lose a customer by having what is effectively a COMPLETELY unsupported service.