Greetings from Ohio.
I haven't been posting regularly from London for a few months now because my Orange broadband service has been out at home. Incredibly, it costs me 50p a minute to call their technical service line and I've called about fourteen times totalling up to about 70 quid ($140 USD). (It also has the effect of looking like I've been calling inappropriate pay lines regularly.)
Each time I call the Indian call centre, some very well-trained person reads through a script, and listens carefully to my problem and then 'escalates' my case to a 'field team'. Of course, that extra time spent doesn't hurt them too much because I'm paying them the equivalent of £30 an hour for the privilege. In fact, they refuse to call me. They keep telling me to call them back to check on the non-existent repairs because they make money from each bloody call.
I would quit, except that the cancellation fee is the balance of my contract (about £120) and I just won't give them the satisfaction of getting money for nothing. I've asked them to stop billing me while I'm waiting for my line to get fixed, but they won't. I'm paying £20 a month but they will refund me, in theory, when it's all fixed, for what I've paid them and for what I've paid to BT for the technical support calls.
I suspect that the problem is that Orange still pays British Telecom for access to their residential phone lines. Orange probably doesn't maintain the lines and when something goes wrong, they are at BT's mercy. In other words, I think Orange is just a call centre in India and a billing centre in Slough. There's nobody with an Orange jumpsuit (think: X-wing pilot) running around fixing lines. It's all a sham.
There are not enough polite words in the language for me to warn people away from Orange Broadband. It is a good service when it works, but the moment something goes wrong, you end up paying for it, quite literally. And you could be out of commission for months, with no resolution in sight.
If anyone from Orange UK is reading this post, here's a hint: don't
bother advertising underneath customer rants about your poor service
delivery. (Click on image to go to the original negative reviews.)
