Having had constant connection problems with Sky Broadband over a 3 month period, i changed over to Orange in August. Suffice to say things have not improved. This issue that i have always had since moving in is that the router that i am using (and i am on the 3rd one) cannot connect without first activating the handset on my land line. Once connected the connection may stay for anywhere from 1 minute to 1 week!

After repeated calls to Orange 'Technical' Support at considerable cost (£0.50 / min for Mac users) i  was pulling my hair out. Instead of keeping some sort of thread of an ongoing problem, every time that i called the Indian call centre one of the resident 'experts' took me through the same old routine of: Have you tried a different filter? How many phone sockets do you have? Do you have a Fax machine of any other device connected to the socket? A cynical person would say that they do this just to bump up the phone bill but i think it is because that don't have sufficient brains to work out that there is a line fault that BT have to sort.

In the end i had to send a scathing letter to customer services and giving them a ten day ultimatum to fix the problem. Since that time i have had calls from several people from Orange all vowing to stay with the fault until resolution and that they would call me back to see if it was fixed.

As it happens, i have had a stable connection since last Monday 13th October, after having complete lack of connection over the preceding weekend. However, my download speed has slowed down from 4.5mbps to a snail-like 800kbps and 250kbps upload!!

As i am a homeworker, i need the internet 24/7....i cannot do my job without it! Most ISP's seem powerless to improve thier service and reliability because of lack of coordination / cooperation between themselves and BT wholesale. What can we do between now and when we drag our telephone / broadband infastructure into the 21st century???????????????

I know, go and work in McDonalds.