Have rung Orange and unsurprisingly they are refusing to let me out of the contract which has 11 months to go without a payment of £82. Have managed to spring a free month out of them but am not well chuffed. Will wait until July next year then will almost certainly leave.

In reply to a post by shep1968:

Have rung Orange and unsurprisingly they are refusing to let me out of the contract which has 11 months to go without a payment of £82. Have managed to spring a free month out of them but am not well chuffed. Will wait until July next year then will almost certainly leave.

Hi, looking on the bright side, your exchange could be upgraded to 21CN WBC before July 2012.

I am in a rural area and there is no sign on the BT list of any upgrade to the Codsall exchange by the end of next year. I have been with orange since the freeserve days, will be leaving next year.

Edited by deleted (Thu 11-Aug-11 16:42:50)

In reply to a post by shep1968:

Have rung Orange and unsurprisingly they are refusing to let me out of the contract which has 11 months to go without a payment of £82.

This is bad. if you signed up to an up to 20Meg service, since your service is not now capable of meeting that due to a change made by Orange. See their complaints procedure at http://www1.orange.co.uk/codesofpractice/#code and I'd urge you to folow it, keeping matters in writing (e-mail will do through the contact form on their website, or write by letter to their contact address in Sunderland); and once you have complained to them and received an unsatisfactory substantive response then refer the matter with the copy correspondence (cut and paste) using the IPSA on-line form at http://www.ispa.org.uk/complaints/. (It worked for me with a very unco-operative ISP).

Orange are good at doing this, I was cut off for 24 hours and moved, without notice, to IPStream where I was told that the maximum speed my line could handle was 2MB. I explained that I was on Sky Connect before Orange and it was BT Wholesale who ran that and I could get 4.6MB on that and I had proof, 2 engineer visits a manual re tuning of my noise margin (from 16dB back to 5dB) and 3 months later I am getting speeds of 4.3MB. A far cry from the bull they tried to palm me off with. Have been promised 3 months free on top of the 3 months I have already had. All because I stuck to my guns, researched the subject before talking to Orange and kept emailing the CEO (only getting the executive office I know but it seems to have done the trick). The only issue I have now is the contention on the line as my exchange was listed as one of those with capacity issues. BT have known about this since at least 2009 as that was my reason for leaving Sky (my speeds dropped to 0.2MB at peak times and Sky agreed that this was unacceptable). BT advised Sky that there would be no quick resolution on this as it was a capacity issue. The estimate is for us to have to wait until December 2011 before something is done, having to wait for more than 2 years is an astoundingly bad decision from BT especially as they know fine well that there are hundreds of new properties being built all over the area that this exchange covers. Orange are slightly better in that the speeds only drop to 1.2MB but this makes playing any games on Facebook a slow and frustrating experience for my wife (who is very vocal on this matter). It goes to show that if you are firm enough, keep your cool and state clearly what you expect (without seeming unreasonable) and when suitably motivated (by threats to open a formal complaint with their ADR provider) and a demonstration that you know when you are being fed bull, then there can be a good(ish) outcome. On another note to shep1968 and MrSaffron, Talk Talk are still the pits, 7 weeks my sister has been waiting on a new router (4 from phone support, 3 from web support), Talk Talks advice "See if you can borrow one from a neighbour in the meantime". Same old garbage customer service in my opinion.

Yes, I can vouch for a formal written complaint being more effective than just talking to ignorant Call Centre script monkeys.

Post deleted by Sadoldman

Don't tell me to [censored] Orange! They haven't broken any contract with me!

Oddly many people with Sky Connect on exchanges switching to other IPStream can get a good service...i.e. Connect suffers a lot from the contention caused by Sky not buying enough capacity on its Central elements.

It is possible you had some exchange based contention on top of Sky Connect issues.

TalkTalk - yes customer service still not great.

Quiet why Orange sent engineers out to tweak noise margin when this is something done from the comfort of a call centre desk I've no idea.

That sort of language is not acceptable.