Every Orange cloud has... another Orange cloud attached to it.

Checked my bank account today to see if the Orange refund promised on the 16th February had materialised and was disappointed but not surprised to find it conspicuous by it's absence.

I contacted Orange billing support and spoke to a friendly lady named Catherine but, sadly, before she could conclude the call we were disconnected. Before the disconnection she revealed that the notes contained no record of the promised £9.99 refund and my account also did not show this refund. The £3.99 refund for the second outage was recorded in the notes but had not been applied to my account. The upshot of this was I was not going to get either refund. We were disconnected while I was on hold while Catherine went to consult her Team Leader.

After the disconnection, I called right back and got a guy called Bain (pronounced Ba-in). I explained to him the call I had just made and he confirmed for himself what Catherine had stated earlier. When he consulted his Team Leader he came back with the news that they would not be refunding me £9.99 as promised for the first outage but £3.74. He has stated that the combined refund (of just under £8) has now been applied to my account and is not just languishing in my notes. This refund should be part of my April 16th bill meaning that I will not be able to confirm the refund in my bank account until that Direct Debit goes through. As an example of how long that takes, an Orange Direct Debit was collected on March 2nd, over two weeks after the billing date. Therefore, I will not be able to see this refund in my bank account until the beginning of May.

There was no apology for not processing my refund. Bain refused to give me the name of the person I talked to on the 16th February (I wish I'd made a note of that aswell, now) mis-citing the Data Protection Act. There was no goodwill gesture toward the phone calls I had to make today which were caused not by technical gremlins but by someone's incompetence or negligence.

The real quality of a company is when things go wrong. Orange hasn't been dreadful but they haven't been good. Both outages were fixed within a week which, by all accounts, is positively gazelle-like for an ISP. The outage was fixed by capping my line speed to a lower rate than before I 'upgraded' my account (I was very happy at 2Mb speed, now I am at 1Mb speed). The promised refunds were not applied immediately and required further phone calls from me to get them.

My contract with Orange lasts until November this year but the ISP market is such ("up to 8Mb connection", they might as well say up to eleventy mcbillion squeegy-bytes) that switching may be a case of out of the frying pan...

Here endeth the moan.

Back on but also back in time

Internet connection was restored today and a further refund of £3.99 should be in my bank account in the middle of March (they never take three weeks to take money, of course, only to return it).

Disagreeably, though, my connection has gone back in time as far as speed is concerned. After a couple of hours use, Orange locked me to a 1mb broadband speed whereas before this two week period of disconnection and for the first couple of hours of this reconnection I had a broadband speed between 2 and 2.5mb (out of a potential 3.5mb).

I contacted Orange about this and got through straight away (which was terrific) and support operative Andrew told me he'd put through a speed increase request. He commented that the lower speed seems to have been necessary to get me back online and that I try reconnecting again in a couple of hours time to see if the request was successful.

You can see my new (lack of) speed measured here.

Well, we'll see if my service is restored to its former state.

Spoke too soon...

Well, my internet connection only lasted a couple of days. It returned Thursday morning and disappeared Sunday afternoon.

I have the same problem as before, slow flashing @ light and "PPP Server Down" error message from the Wireless and Talk router.

It took a very long time to get through to technical support this time, nearly 20 minutes, and I needed to get a little irate with the representative before she assured me she would not go through all the same protocols I had the week before (line test this, line test that) and that it would be bubbled up to the fault service personnel and should be repaired within 48 hours. However, I will be very pleasantly stunned if things are back within 48 hours. Here's hoping.

It could be worse. I happen to live near enough a wireless hot spot to be able to connect to check email and make this post, for example.

Apparently, one week is good

On the very day I posted that my projector seems to be okay (it has now gone up to 100 hour lamp life without problem) my internet connection died. Grief!

I have a Wanadoo branded Inventel wireless router under the Wireless and Talk brand (now operated by Orange). The error was "PPP server down". After six days and five phone calls, my connection is now restored.

However, a friend of mine told me he once had his (not Orange) internet connection disappear for over a month and there are a few other horror stories on the web about Orange technical support.

So I am glad to report that my problem was resolved within this reasonable time frame. It expired on a Thursday afternoon (when we had all that snow). I reported it on a Friday. It was restored about 2am the following Thursday.

Of the five times I called, I was only waiting for a very long time (about two-thirds of an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"!) on one of them and you are informed that you are to be in for a long wait ahead of time. The other times were answered within a couple of minutes, once within about five minutes (again, a 'we are very busy' message was delivered first) and once instantly.

I ended up making sure I phoned during normal-ish working hours as I seemed to get northern English- or Scottish-accented support personnel and they consistently had access to the technical services required. When calling at more exotic times (I am a late-night person), I tended to get strongly Indian-accented support personnel whose access to the relevant technical services needed seemed to be much more erratic.

Upon calling today to process my refund, I was also pleased that they said they will arrange a refund of £9.99 which is double what I was expecting. I pay £19.99 a month and the service was out for nearly a week and so I would have been expecting a refund of about £5. The extra will comfortably pay for the charges on their 0870 technical support number (7 pence a minute).

So, overall, not too bad as far as speed and service and, providing they process it as stated over the phone, I am very happy with the refund. Yay!