back to article Orange mobile broadband takes six-day break

Orange mobile broadband customers have been without internet access since Thursday, and the company cannot tell them when it will be restored. First to go was access to secure websites like Hotmail and Amazon on Thursday of last week. By Saturday there was no internet access at all. We were contacted by a frustrated business …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    DNS

    Their DNS servers have been shonky for a similar length of time. I've had to switch over to using OpenDNS just to get even remotely usable service.

    Just to be helpful the LiveBox they provide you with won't allow you to specify resolvers for it, so I've had to reconfigure every machine manually.

    Paris Hilton because more and more often I'm beginning to think they have as much clue as she does.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Not just Mobile

    Orange Broadband has been stuffed most evenings for the last few days. They are having MAJOR DNS issues (it must be major as they have actually acknowledged the issue).

    From what I have seen it started at the weekend getting worse each day until last night it was completly unusable unless you had a manual public DNS entry in.

    In addtion our PDA's that engineers have had were stuffed Monday and Tuesday.

  3. Nish

    Blackberrys too!

    We had no BB over the weekend or Monday. Seems OK now though.

  4. Andrew

    OK again now

    Indeed DNS on old fashioned wired Orange BB was goosed since about last Thurs.

    Ok again last night though.

    Damn Orange.

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Situation Normal

    As an Orange BB and Mobile phone customer, this is simply another nail in the coffin of my relationship with Orange. They simply do not appear to have the knowledge and skills to run as an Internet Provider in any way (in my personal experience).

    See http://www.orangeproblems.co.uk for more evidence of same.

  7. david bates

    Lucky....

    to get that much sense out of Orange Customer Support.

    I jumped ship six months age and never looked back.

  8. Jason Hall

    OpenDNS

    Not really sure why anyone still uses the Orange DNS servers anyway?

    OpenDNS do a *much* better job.

  9. Tim Scott
    Go

    Home broadband fix...

    I was having problems with DNS servers on my broadband, and as using a livebox could not change the DNS settings...

    In the end, and after some googling around, I changed my username in the livebox set-up pages to end with @bb4.freeserve.co.uk instead of the usually recommended @fs and suddenly my internet was working again with all pages downloading at their normal fast speed

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Roger Shone

    "Any recommendations anyone?"

    I switched to O2 in March. The customer services is first class, the switch over was silky smooth and the connection has (so far - fingers crossed) been excellent.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    @Orange noband by Roger Shone

    I had broadband from Wanadoo & then got taken over by Orange Broadband. Over time the service just seemed to get more and more unreliable, and with not a lot of web searching you can find many people who are unhappy at both their technical and business-ethical performance.

    I'm no longer with Orange Broadband and, based on my own experiences, to anyone else attempting to leave them I'd say "document or copy every part of the transaction".

    Rather than recommend any other specific ISP, as we all have our own preferences or priorities, as these ratings largely match my experiences using 5 ISPs I'd say have a look here:

    http://www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php#

    AC for my own good/paranoid/round-the-twist* reasons.

    *Delete options based upon your own opinion of Orange Broadband.

  12. Simon Painter
    Flame

    @Tim

    I love it when a pedant makes an ass of himself.

    As the article states they are not named for the red berry but for the "surname of Tom Rasberry" and if he wishes to spell his surname in that fashion and the ants are named for him then they are rasperry ants and not raspberry ants.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    tmobile web n walk too

    interesting because tmobile's web n walk service has also been suffering with DNS problems since Thursday - working since 10am this morning - Is it the same underlying service as Orange Mobile Broadband?

  14. brym

    Orange Internet...

    ...is absolutely pants! I bought the HTC Hermes under Orange just over 18 months ago, hoping to take advantage of the HSDPA hardware inside. After recently receiving my upgrade handset, the HTC Kaiser (again with HSDPA hardware inside), Orange still haven't rolled out their HSDPA network.

    You're all concerned about your existing service being made unavailable. I've never once received the "3.5G" service that I'm paying for!

  15. richard tanswell
    IT Angle

    Redundancy?

    I'm surprised how large companies like this can be down for so long! Have they not heard of redundancy or disaster recovery plans?

    When I was in the US last month, international text messaging was down for about 6 days also. Again, the message was: "we apologise and are working on it!".

    Since the French took over, the company has really gone down in my estimation. Shame I'm only 2 months into a new 18 month phone contract with them!!

    Freeserve were crap, Wanadoo were no better and now Orange are even worse! What next? Alistair Darling will do a Northern Rock and try to save Orange in the same way? Oh dear!

    Anyway, as they're French, they probably just shrug their shoulders and just say, OK. Or maybe they'll blame it on the striking fishermen!

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    @Simon Painter <chortle!>

    > I love it when a pedant makes an ass of himself.

    > As the article states they are not named for the red berry but for the "surname of Tom Rasberry" and if he wishes to spell his surname in that fashion and the ants are named for him then they are rasperry ants and not raspberry ants.

    It's even more amusing when someone makes sarky comments about someone - but in the wrong thread!

  17. Sarah Bee (Written by Reg staff)

    ants in the pants

    >>It's even more amusing when someone makes sarky comments about someone - but in the wrong thread!

    They have overrun the entire site. Obv.

    So, yeah, Orange...

  18. Tim Scott

    Orange HSPDA

    I've seen and used HSPDA in a number of areas around UK with with HTC Kaiser, so either your Kaiser ain't working properly, or you just aren't in a coverage area.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RE: brym

    I dont think any of networks have fully rolled out HSDPA to all areas of the country, so you just happen to be in one of those areas. Anyone buying a HSDPA service on ANY network should check the HSDPA coverage in areas they're going to be regulary before buying it.

    I have HSDPA coverage on Orange in my house.

  20. Steven
    Thumb Down

    Wouldn't touch Orange internet services with yours.

    I've seen Orange rated as worse ISP in loads of online polls, and I can see why, both my cousin and my brother have Orange noband. The Live box they give you is frankly awful (not to mention looks hideous) and the service is unreliable at the best of times. Go with O2 (20mb) or Be (24mb), they're faster and a damn site more reliable (if you can get them of course).

  21. Fresher

    @richard tanswell

    "Since the French took over, the company has really gone down in my estimation."

    Have you not noticed yet that the crap service you get from companies in England has nothing to do with the French (or other nations, or immigrants) and everything to do with dumb asses not having the balls to take a stand and stop paying for the crap?

  22. Manley

    Have you tried

    turning it off and on again

  23. Mitch Kent
    Heart

    A good deal, hard to turn down

    I'm with Orange and have had similar DNS problems of late, the push I needed to move over to OpenDNS. I'm happy so far.

    Lot's of people complain about Orange but I guess I'm one of the lucky few. Last week's DNS was the first issue I've encountered with them. Otherwise I get a mobile contract with unlimited text and 550 mintues, free calls to my orange landline from my mobile, free calls to my mobile to my landline, and their top broadband package all for £40 a month. 1 DNS issue over the course of 18 months (and I really shouldn't have been relying on them for DNS anyway) isn't going to make me jump ship, especially when I've no reason to believe any of the alternatives are any better.

    Sure, the livebox is a piece of crap, but you get what you pay for, and I didn't pay anything for it.

    I'm in a well populated area - be interesting to know if many of the problematic connections are randomly placed or in particular areas...

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    To Roger Shone and any others thinking of a new supplier.

    Get your self on Vodafone, I have been using my Vodafone USB modem for over 12 months now, never had a problem (well once I got my content bar removed anyway). They have a good tech team too if you do have any issues.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    HSDPA not working on Orange

    I've been trying to set up my HSDPA on Orange today and keep getting "Page Not Displayed" error messages when connected to the network. Getting connected is easy, but getting a website up is like pulling teeth.

    Vista's own diagnostic says im having DNS problems because 193.35.133.10 is not reachable.

    This problem is hideously massive if it has lasted the 6+ days as people have suggested.

    I have given up with them as I am actually paying good money for websites that won't load properly or need refreshing several times before they complete. This is costing me more money in Megabytes to refresh so many times so why should the customer pay for their incompetance?

    Orange management don't take these faults seriously enough. What will it take for them to stop disappointing so many millions of customers that pay THEIR wages...

  26. John Holland

    Not just mobile broadband

    My Orange broadband has now been down for over two days (since Thursday afternoon), their second line landline phone rather longer - no acknowledgement of problems on their website last time I looked, their support staff won't commit to a timescale for restoring this. This is amateurish beyond belief and absolutely hopeless.

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