Nowadays, if you lose your ability to get online conveniently, it’s almost as if you disappear. At least that’s what it felt like. We’ve finally got our Internet connectivity sorted and it’s a relief. It wasn’t easy though. Extremely painful actually.

We started by doing our research and had the following shortlist and came to the following conclusions:

  • Virgin Media – Good deal. For £20 we could have got pay TV and broadband (with speed and download limits) and they don’t need us have a BT line to connect (which means no need to pay £11 per month to BT to have the line connected). No wireless router though, so would have had to buy one and set it up ourselves. We would have been rejected based on the credit check though. We know this because we both tried to sign up for Virgin Mobile plans and got rejected. Their customer service wasn’t particularly useful because all they could tell us was that their credit check agency only gives them yes and no answers. If we want to find out why, we have to write in. YES, you read that right. I said “write in”. Via snail mail. No email. Can’t even call. Can’t even turn up to an address. Great way to lose potential customers Virgin Mobile! Idiots. Needless to say, we didn’t bother. I have a short fuse for bad customer service.
  • Tiscali – Best price, but don’t give you a wireless router and takes 3 weeks to process. We didn’t want to wait that long. If you are patient, don’t want pay TV and can be bothered to go set up your own wireless router (assuming you want one), this is the one to go for. They even take over your BT line rental so you no longer need to pay BT the monthly £11 fee for the privilege of having a BT line. You do need to have a BT line in the first place to get set up however.
  • Sky – We wanted to go with Sky because at the time they had a £26 monthly deal that included broadband, pay TV and free off peak local calls. They also include a wireless router with the plan. We only got a BT phone line so we could get this deal. Problem is that when it came time to sign up, they told us our area didn’t qualify for the plan and we had to fork out £40 per month. This was on top of the £11 BT line rental because they don’t take it over. We said thanks but no thanks.
  • BT – Too expensive (unless you go for the el-cheapo plan with the limits on speed and downloads) so we ruled them out.
  • Talk Talk – Good value for money as well. Slightly more than Tiscali, but this seems to be very popular. There’s a long waiting list and we were told we’d have to wait at least a month to get it set up. No wireless router and you have to actually buy the modem off them at an additional cost of about £30. They also take over your BT line rental and the £11 is included in the plan. We didn’t have the patience to wait that long and to have to pay for the modem as well.
  • Orange – We went with Orange and signed up to their Broadband Unlimited plan for £20 per month. Unlimited downloads at decent speed. They don’t cover the £11 BT line rental though, so we’ve still got to pay that. Why did we go for Orange then? Because they ship a wireless modem which they call a Livebox and therefore also provide support for it. The other thing the deal included was the ability to make unlimited local and international calls to landline numbers. We just had to plug in a phone to the Livebox and the calls would go through their VOIP service. They also promised to get us up and running within 2 weeks. Not the cheapest service, but the unlimited calls and prompt enablement of the service made us pick this one. Little did I know, their customer service would make BT’s customer service look like the best in the world.

Having had our BT line setup in preparation for Sky (which we didn’t end up going with, but would have needed anyway for Orange’s service), we had a few initial issues with the line. BT enabled the line but it didn’t work. They had to get an engineer out here to fix it. To their credit, they had this fixed pretty quickly with only a little bit of a fuss. The fuss involved us not being here when the engineer was going to arrive because we were still staying in Limehouse (our friend Lommy’s place) at the time and a little bit of a mix up between what BT’s customer service person told me and what the engineer had written on his notes about the arrangements. We eventually got here and the engineer managed to come back later to fix the fault. All good.

We signed up to Orange about 2 weeks ago and they assured us we’d be ready to go within 10 days. The 10th day was the Friday that just passed. The issues started on Tuesday 1st May when I called Orange to ask 2 questions. The first was in relation to a strange coincidence that occurred. I received an email from Orange saying our line was now enabled for their broadband service. At the same time, our phone line stopped working. I asked them why the phone line wasn’t working and they blamed BT. So I reported this fault with BT and they fixed it quite promptly (only took 2 days, which is good for a telco company). The engineer asked me if we had recently signed up to broadband because that’s what knocked our phone line off the exchange. I told him yes. In other words, it was Orange’s fault. You would think that they’d test the line to ensure it still worked after they screw around with it. But that would make too much sense, so I suppose that’s why Orange don’t bother. Idiots.

The second question I asked was when they would send the Livebox out to us. They said that they had tried to deliver it that day (Tuesday 1st May) and we weren’t home. That was fine. I was actually out doing grocery shopping (yes I’m quite capable of that) and Mimi was working. They then told me they would try to re-deliver it the following day, that being Wednesday 2nd May. I stayed home all day and still nothing. I called Orange again on Thursday 3rd May to ask. Apparently they had tried and no one was home. I was incredulous! I had been imprisoned at home all day waiting for their stupid delivery and they were now telling me no one was home! All the customer service person told me was that there was nothing they could do about it and that they would re-deliver it on Friday 4th May. I asked why they couldn’t do it on Thursday and if I could call the couriers myself to ask what the hell was going on. The rather unhelpful guy at the other end of the phone simply said they wouldn’t talk to me and all communications with the courier had to go through Orange. I said OK and that to make sure it got delivered on Friday. I stayed home all day again on Friday and still nothing. I called them at 5pm and asked again what was going on. They called the courier company who advised them that the parcel had been picked up and would be delivered by 6pm. I waited. At 6:30pm, I called them again only to find out that they had apparently tried to deliver it at 4:55pm and no one was home. I let them have it this time (as calmly as possible) and the poor guy at the other end told me he would call the couriers to find out what was going on. I got them to check that the address they had was correct. It was, so I could not for the life of me figure out why a courier company had managed to hire couriers that were incapable of delivering things to the right address! The Orange customer service guy informed me that they were now closed but he had ordered a re-delivery for me the next day (Saturday). I asked if that was possible because I wasn’t aware they would deliver on Saturdays. The Orange customer service person assured me it would be done. This time he even gave me the courier company’s name (Parcel Force), parcel reference number and the number to call if I needed to. He finished off the call by telling me that I could look it up online and put in the tracking number to get a status. I told him I would love to except I didn’t have a frigging Internet connection. He knew I wasn’t amused so that was the end of the call.

This time, I knew better than to trust that it would get delivered so I called the number for Parcel Force. Unfortunately, the pre-recorded message advised that we could only use the voice system to check the status of our package as they were closed. I knew I had to find another way so I called Lommy and got him to get me the number of the depot where the parcel was being held. I called and found out they don’t deliver on Saturdays (so once again Orange were wrong) but I could pick it up myself. We decided we’d had enough of this waiting around for incompetent couriers so we decided to go. The depot was in Acton but our street directory didn’t go out that far. So once again I had to call in a favour from Lommy and get him to look up the address and give me the directions. We had to take the tube to West Acton and walk to the depot. Unfortunately, they were doing maintenance on the relevant train line that would have gotten us there so we had to get there the long way. What was usually a half hour journey turned into an hour and a half. It took us so much longer than we anticipated that we had to run to the depot from West Acton tube station and only got there a minute before it closed. I would have been even more peeved if we had gone to all that trouble and not managed to get the parcel.

All the way through this saga, I kept thinking about what I should write in a complaint letter to Orange. I have a good mind to send them a bill for all the additional costs: 4 phone calls (charged at 7p per min), cost of using Wifi hotspots and Internet cafes while waiting for the stupid Livebox to arrive and finally the cost of the train tickets to get to the depot to pick up the package ourselves. By my calculations, they owe us a few months of free service. If I add in “consultation services for fault testing their system”, I think we’d be owed a year or 2 of free broadband. At least we managed to do something constructive that afternoon. We went to the London Borough Market near London Bridge and bought a few things so our Saturday wasn’t as wasted as we originally thought it would be.

My main problems with this whole process with Orange are:

  • It should not be the customer’s responsibility to ensure that the equipment is delivered. It should also not be the customer’s responsibility to coordinate getting the equipment re-delivered!
  • Their customer service team is unhelpful and not very pro-active.
  • They blamed BT for their mistake in breaking our line.
  • They placed all the blame on their couriers. If you outsource a service, it is not the customer’s problem. As a business, it should all be your problem. I shouldn’t need to have to call your courier company to find out what’s going on.
  • If a customer isn’t getting their service within the promised time (10 days in this case), as a service provider, you should be going out of your way to ensure something is done about it. We got our service after 11 days and this was only because we were pro-active about it.

Well, that’s my rant and whinge about our Internet setup problems. Needless to say, unless Orange do something to fix their image with us, I’m not renewing our contract with them after 12 months. Yes, we’re stuck in a stupid 12 month contract. No one is more sore about that fact than me.

Oh if anyone’s wondering why we didn’t bother with pay TV like we initially intended, we decided to settle for Freeview. You just need to buy a set top box. There are no subscription fees. Not bad because you get lots more channels than you usually would if you rely on the free-to-air channels. The cheapest one we could find was on Amazon. We bought this one. It’s working well so far. We also bought a 26″ LCD Philips TV from Argos if anyone’s wondering. It was a discontinued model, but much cheaper than any other current model 26″ LCD TV. Our home phone was also from Argos. We’ve found Argos and Amazon seem to have the cheapest (best value for money) electronics…and they deliver. Of course, if they happen to use Parcel Force, good luck getting it on time!