Friday 2 May 2008

Orange Outage

Not much blogging here of late.

Partly due to much family activity going on around the time of Samwise' Birthday - I'll catchup with an update on this at a later date.

Mainly due to having no Broadband at home for over a week!! 4 frustrating calls to a call centre in Mumbai, plus one to BT to confirm that there's nothing wrong with the line, until I finally got an operative that knew what they were talking about.
Basically Orange have been doing some maintenance work, and they've botched the job, resulting in no internet access for us.

I could understand this, but the frustrating thing was the lies that I was given during the first 4 calls. They said they were doing a line check, but in the meantime could I just try resetting my router?
I went through this activity four times. The last operative said that in fact no line check had been made, so the router resets were just a stalling tactic, based on a supposition that most problems are at the user end.

I was told that in fact Orange had carried out maintenance activities at 3 different times over the past week. Looks like they still haven't got it right.
I've got the name of the last operative, who has made a lot of re-assuring noises, and will be calling me back with a status update whilst further maintenance activities are carried out to repair the problem.

(As you might guess I'm not blogging from home right now).

Hopefully we'll be back online soon - although there is a Bank Holiday coming up - what's the bet it won't be resolved until after Monday?

2 comments:

impwork said...

Which is pretty much why I ditched Orange last year. They botched a hardware upgrade.

I don't mind that problems happen and I don't mind going through a set of steps to make sure the problems at my end once. Once I've confirmed its beyond my control the script needs to change. Someone needs to do what needs to be done to fix the problem not repeat the previous requests.

I don't blame the call centre staff either - they are not the ones who do the line testing they just request it be done. In my case it turned out the reason they couldn't do the line test was the bodged upgrade had involved leaving the box in the exchange in testing mode...

Anyway good luck with getting back online :-)

darkdwarf said...

You're right - it's not the fault of the call centre staff. Unfortunately there is a language and cultural difference between them and me, which adds to the frustration when trying to get to the bottom of the issue.

I think that they've tried to communicate to me that the line test requests don't always come back to them, so they have to try again.

If a line test comes back showing a fault then they can get an "engineer" to investigate.

It's not clear to them what they should do if the line test shows "no fault" but I still can't connect. Reverting to the standard steps is OK, but after the 10th time they don't seem to know where/how to escalate this.

I spoke to a supervisor yesterday (and asked for her name and surname). She said that she'd ensure that "appropriate steps" were taken. Awaiting an update...