Either I am a very unlucky person with my selection of the Internet Service Providers or the quality standard in the business is simply appalling. In a small country like Luxembourg, there is not much choice. And now I can already warn of two operators from those available: Luxembourg Online and Orange Luxembourg.
When switching from Luxembourg Online’s and Eltrona’s joint cable modem catastrophe, described earlier in this blog, to Orange ADSL Flat Solo, I was first very happy with their service. Compared to Luxembourg Online, the service was indeed online most of the time. There were some occasional breaks, but the default was that when going to bed, I could expect the service to be there the next morning. This is not anymore the case.
During the first half of 2014, I have had two sets of problems.
The first one started little by little and concerned the speed. I started taking notes in February 2014. Typically the download speed was 1-3 million bits per second (mbps) when the promised maximum was 10 mbps. (These ISPs, they never promise you a minimum speed, just the maximum – I think the consumer authorities should do something about this.) At worst, however, the download speed went down to 0.4 mbps, far below the upload speed of 0.8 mbps that according to www.speakeasy.net’s speed test was always reasonable. Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line indeed!
The download speed of 2-3 mbps was still acceptable for use of internet connection in our family, but when the speed dropped below 1 mbps, watching YLE News and Piervij Kanal was not possible anymore due to frequent breaks of the video stream.
I tried to take contact with the Orange Help desk over email, but it was impossible. Either the correspondents were not at the level of their tasks or they simply did not want to do anything. I spent a lot of time queuing for their phone service, some times just to hear after 20 minutes of queuing that the working day was over at 6 p.m. In April-May 2014 I somehow got through and it seemed that there was a solution to the problem: my user-id was changed (“vox” was replaced by “orange” as one element of the user-id.).
For some time in May, everything seemed to work fine.
But only until June 2014. The second set of problems appeared soon after the first and still bothers me. On, for example, 3 June, 4 June, 8 June, 10 June, 12 June, 13 June, 17 June, and 18 June my internet connection (TCP/IP) simply did not work. Curiously, during almost all this time, Skype worked without any problems, so I could call my family visiting Moscow every evening, but I could not see local web sites. Some sites, however, sometimes worked, so I could every now and then access www.taloussanomet.fi, but not www.hs.fi, for example. Asymmetric, indeed!
I called the Orange Helpdesk (800 61 606, then “1” for French and “4” for ADSL problems) almost every evening. Perhaps to help me, they have extended the opening hours of the phone service from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., so I do not even need to take half-a-day off from work when I want to contact them. Unfortunately, the technical service has different working hours (from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., I think), so my problems are not dealt during the same day, and I need to call the Helpdesk again the evening of the following day to tell whether anything has improved – or insist on getting more help.
So what was the receipt? In June 2014, I restarted my router several times every day. I took it to Howald to have it examined by an Orange engineer, I tried different Ethernet cables and slots, and Orange generously made me a gift of a new telephone cable. I tried the connection with the cable and WiFi between iOS and Windows PCs. I hanged around Orange’s telephone Helpdesk almost every day.
When looking at the log files of my modem, there is a lot of traffic from different ports that was not there before. The Helpdesk has never asked to have my log files, but I guess Orange’s engineers have the same information on their servers’ logs so there is no need to have a duplicate.
I have tried switching of the firewall and the Adblock Plus in my Firefox – no effect at all.
The Network Diagnostics of my iMAC gives me the impression that the problem is on their side and not on my side, but I am sure that Orange will have the best lawyers to explain to me and the judge that there are some paragraphs in the contract that, finally, they are not responsible for anything, and the fact that my internet does not work is just the normal fulfillment of their contractual stipulations.
On 19 June 2014, my internet connection worked and the speed was even excellent (like it has been recently always on those days when it works). I called the Helpdesk to thank them and asked if they had done anything special for me. The mentioned something about the “réarrangement des lignes” – I do not understand what it means, probably the person at Helpdesk neither. Anyway, my connection was impeccable. But only until 20 June. Then the same problems reappeared and continued the whole weekend. Of course, I called the Helpdesk on Saturday – and will do so again on Tuesday after the national holiday.
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