Right, following on from all the complaints I have read on this forum, the time has come to launch a dedicated post which will aim to answer questions/complaints etc on the Orange network. This includes poor coverage, dropped calls, poor customer service etc and this will be fed back within the hierarchy.

So feel free to post and questions/comments and I'll try my best to answer and or escalate.

Can we please limit to sensible questions/comments - no abuse please!!!!

cheers

Bloody 'ell, you're brave!

The new Mr Orange, eh? Welcome, it's been a while.

OK, to start. The lack of a cheap high usage data plan. The ridiculous way the Orange World Unlimited bundle was (not) advertised, seemingly not even to OCS, could be obtained by some users and not others even on identical price plans, even to others with far less monthly spend than others and has led to the situation where some of your valued customers have found that this package has not materialised on their account and they are now locked into an 18 month contract without the main feature they signed up for.

Oh, and the four hour waits to get through to OCS.

cheers :-)

points noted and fed back. As you can appriciate I will be unable to solve all problems. but use this as a way to feed issues back. I will then escalate them and hopefully find a way to resolve them.

Great idea hopefully this might if nothing else get Orange listening..........always the first step, even if nothing happens.

2 gripes only.

1. Data costs are extortionate, if they competed with T-Mobile even for a £10 a month so many more people would use it, I have even stopped using my email and internet on the phone as the costs are just reiduclous. How on earth can they justify £88 for unlimited data when T-Mobile offer it for £7.50. I can only imagine on average most users would require about 10 - 15Mb a day which would cover the majority.

2. The customer services department is a waste of time now. Its so annoying that a couple of years ago Orange where so far ahead of everyone else when it came to support, but now calls take at minimum 45mins if you are incredibly lucky and then when you get through the services are so compicated no-one unsterstands.

Come on Orange sort it out, I along with many many others are on the way to T-Mobile fo these 2 reasons, and its so frustrating as the Orange signal and quality of 2G / 3G as far as i'm concerned is fantastic, its just the damn internet costs.

ohh, so many things and such a small box to type them all in


1) 4 people answering the phones isnt enough, and im sure i've spoken to the cleaner at some point

2) itemised data billing - "you have used some data" i say prove it to me

3) how about some unlimited data for us who dont want to spend £50+ a month on line rental

4) certificates, installing ones from geotrust, in a "its signed by geotrust and its a updated root cert" see this http://www.msmobilenews.com/page/1441/

5) being last to release servicepacks for phones, but push email doesnt work unless you pay the right people to sign the exchange certs

6) stop charging for itemised call billing or make your website work even when there are items over 28 days old on it

7) Stop making asshat ideas become reality, if it sounds stupid in your head its going to upset the great unwashed (the punters)

later

Owen
"feeling the love"

this seems to be a common complaint from the digging around i have done accross the various forums on the net......

You're a brave man!

I left Orange mainly for the cheap data on T. OWU seems to be a bit of a joke. The only other problem I had was the CS - you can't get through to them and when you do they sound so demoralised and never phone you back when they say they will - T ALWAYS phone back.

Since joining T I've found their voice and text plans - especially flext are very good as well - but that's just down to pricing which you can't do anything about so the main complainst (apart from data prices) is the lack of CS

Good luck

what do you guys think of the general 2G/3G coverage? dropped calls etc?

Confucious make good point!

If someone says they will call you back it is common courtesy to at least attempt to phone back once. During one particularly troublesome month I would say I was promised about 14 call backs and not once, NOT ONCE, was one actually made.

Also, it is incredibly frustrating not having access to someone who knows what they are talking about! I accept that I have more knowledge about your products than front line OCS but this means when I want to sort something out I need to speak to a level 2 representative not have my messages garbled by chinese whispers. Case in point, one of my C500's developed a random hardware fault but because it didn't fit the script nobody in OCS would authorise a replacement. However they either failed to pass on the info I gave them or did so incorrectly, hence I got told about 14 times (was meant to have been phoned back but wasn't) that I needed to, "Hard reset my phone". At the end of this month I felt like literally banging my head against a brick wall, not just figuratively.

I have only 1 issue with 2G / 3G coverage and thats indoors the signal drops to much where I live.
but this is much the same on all.
In general I have no problems with coverage, and to be honest I am trialling T-Mobile in my old M2000 phone to see if I can dump Orange due to the data costs, but the orange signal is far superior and especially the 3G coverage.(a friend uses T-Mobile and rarely has 3G) mine is almost permantly connected, but again due to the data costs I am still very tempted to put up with a weaker signal and cheap data than a strong signal that I cant use because data is too expensive

I would say coverage is one of Orange's beter points - especially in the west country and outlying areas. Personally I've had no problems with T .

I found the coverage maps over optimistic in my area (East Kent) - lots of transmitters but actual signal seemed poor.

I'm sure there's a good reason but why on the cheapest contract do Orange charge £249 for SPV M3100 whilst T-Mobile on a contract at the same price (and actually offering slightly more usage) only charge £89 for the same device? Combined with uncompetative data charges (well unless you count O2's data charges as a benchmark ) I don't see why anyone would sign up with Orange.

The point blank refusal to arrange a replacement or repair when a fault develops after 6 months. By law it is Orange's responsibility to do this but tghe supervisor I spoke to last week claimed that was not the case despite me reading the law verbatim from the DTI website. I am currently stuck with a C600 with a white screen (the 2nd time this has happened) and Orange won't do anything & HTC say it's for Orange to deal with(quite correctly). My only options appear to be claim on my phone insurance at a cost of £30 or just accept I have an unusuable phone and live with it.

Fortunately my contract is up in December and I will be leaving after this shocking piece of Customer service

This is an interesting point!

Why do Orange refer customers who have developed a fault with one one of their SPV series handsets to HTC after 6 months? Were the SPV's not sold to Orange with HTC being nothing more than the ODM.. and therefore Orange hold all responsibility for warranty repair?

Hiya,
Just a quick question really, I'm on pay as you go - only been on 3 weeks though seems more - With the free texts offer, when do you recieve them? Is it roughly from when i joined or is meant to be from the end of the month?? Just a quick question, but very good idea for aa topic.
goochy1

2G coverage is generally excellent. 3G coverage is good where I am in London - when it works! Over the last month, my local cell has lost 3G on about 15 occasions ie every other day for a few hours at a time.

Either I lose signal completely and have no data or voice, or data keeps working but the network doesn't respond to voice calls.

I had the same problem at waterloo station last week.

Switching the device to 2G is the only way to use it when that happens.

I personally have not had a problem with customer services...with the phone answered usually within a minute...but I guess I must be on premier.

My main complaint with O right now is their lack of innovation. Sure their customer service has deteriorated, but I usually find that enough persistence still gets results (it helps if you are on a high end package).

More often than not other providers seem to have the best ROM version for whatever model of HTC phone there is. O are usually the last to release updates, and the first to remove services from their ROMs that people liked! Their failure to capitalise of the original Orange homescreen plugin was a disaster for smartphone I think, when you look at the today screen utilities on PPC it amazes me that no one in O thought the smartphone homescreen was worth persuing as a revenue source - they seemed to just replace it with that Abaxia nonsense and have left it at that.

I just don't see anything that exciting in O's approach to smartphones. Their model range seems to be more concentrated on making a sexy looking phone, than on better functionality, beter services, better software ...

Gripes...

- Waiting four hours on hold to speak to customer services and still not getting through
- Finally getting through and being told I'd get a call back, and not getting said call back by two days later...

I'm very very furious about the waiting on hold four hours, and even more mad at still not having the issue solved even after that. There's a limit to the %age of my waking hours I am willing to spend listening to god awful muzak; I can't face phoning again to remind them that I did survive it and that my phone still doesn't work properly.

It's got to be financially worth Orange's while not to do that to people. It sounds bad when I tell *everyone* I know (and that means *everyone*, whether they want to listen or not), and looks worse when I show them the call history thingy on my phone if they don't believe me.

For me, anything else, like dropped calls, slightly iffy 3G coverage, phones that seem to be 98% or thereabouts ready for release, extortionate data charges and any other minor stuff pales into insignifigance.

I deeply regret taking out the new contract. I had in the duration of the previous contract considered moving to another provider after billing problems, and realise that the loyalty that saw me stay with Orange was very misguided. I may have the best contract known to man in terms of price of voice calls, but some things just aren't worth it.

No complaints with coverage just customer service. I upgraded my contract a few months ago and wasn’t told it was 18 months (wouldn’t have minded if I had been told) and by chance I received a bill within 7 days so phoned to enquire why I wasn’t told, I was also told when I was upgrading that I would get 5MB of data every month included (the reason I opted for a more expensive contract) but according to the bill it was 0.5MB so I was wanting to resolve that, eventually got through to someone who could help but was promised a call back. Never got a call back so phoned again and this time was told as I was out with the 7 days cooling off period there was nothing that could be done, and of course there was no record of my original call.

Is there a proper way to raise a complaint before going to something like Ofcom? Preferably an email or snail mail address cause I have tried phoning again but I have better things to with day.

Nyami