Orange ADSL Flat Solo – it works!

I was still rather bitter in the summer of 2014 about the quality of the Orange ADSL Flat Solo connection and its provider Orange Luxembourg. But I am not anymore, as the problems were solved in the autumn of 2014 and my connection has worked correctly ever since. During this period of more than 1 year and a half, I have had no need to contact the Orange Helpdesk and, for the time being, I have even abandoned the idea of subscribing to the Post’s fiberglass network that they generously brought to our cellar in the meantime doubling the monthly fee would be too much given that the current service fulfils all our needs.

We are heavy users of our ADSL connection – it is a really the backbone of our telecommunications: we have neither cable television nor fixed telephone; we watch the news over Internet and call our international calls using Nimbuzz.

I still wonder what was the reason for the connection problems in 2014. My experience is that these ISP (Luxembourg Online and Orange Luxembourg) are not too transparent about their problems – either they do not know themselves or they simply hide their mistakes in the arch-French manner. Consequently, I do not think I will ever know. However, I can tell what I tried in the autumn 2014 on my side and that might have played some sort of role in improving the service. Before a solution to the problem was found, there were several trials: First, there was some cock-up with the service provider’s password that was solved with the helpdesk. Second, I was travelling around the city with the ZyXEL P660HW-D1 router in my bag to get it verified by a technician who was never there. Third and, last, the helpdesk offered a new telephone cable to connect the router to the wall socket. None of these actions solved the problem.

I also tried something by myself.

First, it seems that the Internet services do not like interruptions. In 2014, all electronics in my bureau were behind an electronic timer, including the router. Standby consumption is the most vicious electricity consumption of all. So I had a time that switch of the router, PC, the printer and other toys for the night and for that period of the working days when no one was at home. Additionally, I thought that this would improve the security of the home network as nobody could see the Wi-Fi network or even the router when they were switched off. I do not know, but it might be that this kind of energy saving arrangements and interruptions somehow disturb the WAN connection. So on of the things that I changed in 2014 was to keep the router powered all time, day and night.

Second, I think that I found a (slightly cumbersome) workaround to reinitialize the WAN connection. When the speed of the Internet connection was low, typically evan below 1 mbps of the contractual 10 mbps, I signed in to the router, changed the WAN password to something arbitrary and then back again to the correct one. This seemed to work and each time repeating this exercise after low speed, the gain in speed remained.

I do not know if the suppression of interruptions and the workaround to reinitialize the service helped to identify the problems, but currently my Orange FLAT ADSL is running fine and we are happy with the service.