Friday night, 8:45pm, I fire up my trusty laptop and hit the connect icon. And... nothing happens. All I get is a message that 'remote computer not responding'. I repeat for 2 hours, with no better results. Same all day Saturday, so I look to ring them.
One problem with Orange is that they hide their contact details. You can look on their web site for quite a while without finding a number, and, if you have no internet access, a number is what you need. In fact the status of their service can be found at 0845-330-7124. Customer services is 0870-010-2462.
I call them up, and end up on the phone for 22 minutes while they get me to create a new internet connection, reboot, etc, which of course fails. Then they tell me to keep my PC on for 4 hours (!) while they do a line test. But *I* have to ring them again -- on their national rate number, naturally -- to find out the results.
I don't use my PC on Sunday, so power the PC up at 8:15am on Monday. Still no connection. Turn off and draw curtains, etc. I then go for the phone, at 8:40, and restart my PC. To my amazement it connects. Evidently someone came into work at 8:30, saw that something was down and flipped a switch.
I'm not sure how I feel about Orange. Their service is very reliable, and outages are few. But they do not deal with them very well when they occur.
Certainly their customer service has improved from what it was last time, when they pretended never to have heard of my modem -- a Speedtouch 330 USB, which every single one of the customers they bought from Wanadoo would be using -- and simply tried to get me to sign up to a new contract. But... they still have some way to go. We wouldn't tolerate a telephone outage of 48 hours, without apology. Why should we expect one for the internet?
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