Disconnected (2)

I spoke to soon in my Disconnected post - the broadband connection went down the day after, just after midday.

Back on the phone to Orange, back to India Technical Support, back through the "diagnostics" umpteen times again. They told me to wait for the replacement router that was in it's way, and the callback that was due on Tuesday 13th at 7pm.

8pm on Tuesday 13th. No replacement router and No callback! Back on the phone to Orange, back to India Technical Support who passed the buck to Customer Services. Customer Services, who also sounded like they might be in India, told me that there didn't appear to be an order for a router. They passed me to the escalation team.

The chap on the escalation team sounded very sheepish when I asked him why there had been no callback at 7pm. He told me that not only had the callback been missed, but they hadn't ordered the replacement router! (What a bunch of numpties?) He said that he'd immediately ordered the router, which should arrive on Friday.

Thursday morning and the new router arrived. Tried it out on Thursday night, and as I suspected no connection. Back on the phone to Orange, back to India Technical Support - ran through the usual diagnostics. Tried to pass me back to the escalation team, who tried to fob me off as a courtesy callback was due on 19th Jan. I demanded to speak to them so I was put through. The lady who answered told me that all diagnostics had been done, so she couldn't help and that I should await the callback on the 19th Jan. I demanded an earlier callback, so the best she could do was 09:30 on 17th Jan.

09:30 am today and I found myself speaking to the chap who had forgotten to call on Tuesday. He said that he would now ask BT to investigate and arranged a follow up callback on Monday 19th to let me know what they had found out.

10:45 am and we noticed the internet connection come back online for a minute or so. Looks like somebody is doing some testing on the network.

13:00 and we're back online, and have been so since then.

Why oh why oh why can't the numpties at Orange involve BT at an earlier stage? I explained to them the history of this case. They should have been able to see for themselves that we'd had a similar situation in May last year, where the Orange customer equipment and connection diagnostics all check out OK, but the BT line tests show "no fault".
They seem to have a reluctance to escalate to BT. It should not take 15 days to get to this stage.

I'm going to wait for their callback on the 19th and ask for an explanation as to what BT said the problem was. My own suspicion is that maintenance work in the exchange around Bank Holidays causes a configuration change that affects our service. There's probably a special set up for our line, or for Orange customers (and I bet that there's not many left in Liverpool) that they keep resetting and forgetting to reconfigure.

I'd like to know as I believe the root cause lies with BT. This is compounded by Orange's inability to quickly establish that the fault is not with the customer's setup or equipment, and not with them.

Then I'll be calling Orange Customer Services and asking for my MAC code.

Originally we used Demon, but when free dial up access became available, we opted for Freeserve. Freeserve were OK and then were taken over by Wanadoo who gave us our first taste of broadband. We had no problems with Wanadoo. Our experience of the service has gone downhill since Orange took over.

We're now both suffering from online access withdrawal and need a heavy fix of email, web and download time to feel normal again :) It's actually a little scary - you don't realise how much you depend on something like the internet access from home, until it's not there. The local library and work is no substitute.