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.

Orange ADSL Flat Solo - Another Failure

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.

Private e-mail folders lost - again

These offline guys keep on surprising me!

I still happen to have a free e-mail account with Luxembourg Online. I acquired it years before I entered into the most frustrating customer relationship that is described elsewhere in this blog.

Now they have fucked up my e-mail folders for the second time in a couple of years. The previous time they fought hard and succeeded in saving the subject fields and addresses of the correspondents. - This time everything was gone, all private folders just disappeared. Off course, there was no apologizing message from the help desk – I had to find it out myself. They were though kind enough to answer my request and it did not even take ages, just a couple of days. Chapeau, Luxembourg Online!

In practically all data processing teams, they have a good practice of taking backups, in the past it was often on tape – today probably on magnetic disk and possibly using a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID system). Tapes used to be taken sometimes weekly for non-critical data, daily for production systems. I really think that these offline guys have backups as well. They are just too lazy and arrogant to provide any help or support to those inferior beings called customers. Even if the backup had been one month old, the difference between it and full recovery would have been insignificant.

Here the authentic exchange of messages:

"Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:28:48 +0200
From: helpdesk@internet.lu
Reply-To: helpdesk@internet.lu
To: kenlie@internet.lu

Bonjour,

Nous vous confirmons réception de votre courrier életronique.

Malheureusement, suite a des problèmes avec le serveur mail, les dossiers perdu ne peuvent plus être récuperé.

Nous nous tenons a votre dispositions pour tout autres questions.


Cordialement

Luxembourg Online Sa"

"---------- Message original ----------
Received: from nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn by nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn
INC_SMTP_SERVER 2.57;
Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:11:16 +0200
Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:11:15 +0200
Received: from nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn by nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn INC_SMTP_SERVER 2.56; Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
From: kenlie@internet.lu
Reply-To: kenlie @internet.lu
X-Mailer: INCSMTP 2.56
Message-Id: 1493420652-1606929827-571491328@INC_SMTP_SERVER
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: helpdesk@internet.lu
Subject: Dossiers perdus
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Messieurs,
Tous mes dossiers de courriel ont diapparus.
Comment les retrouver?
kenlie
---------------------------------------"

The last invoices

Persisting connection problems in March lead to the only reasonable conclusion: The change of the ISP. Consequently, I sent the required registered letter to Luxembourg Online. In general condition of Luxembourg Online the deadline for cancelling the service is set to 40 days, so I had to rush a bit with my cancellation.

In my letter I suggested an arbitration of the end of the contract in such a way that the cancellation would take effect at the end of May, two weeks after the delivery of the cancellation letter. In that case, I promised to pay the April invoice immediately - in the case of non approval of my suggestion, I would make an appointment to the local consumer organisation. As a justification for such mediation, I mentioned the fact that the quality of the service is bad. The summer-time service has not improved despite the intervention of the Eltrona technician almost a year ago.



The technical provider of the cable connection is Eltrona. Because my main reason for the Eltrona subscription has been the possibility to have fast internet connection, I cancelled the cable-TV connection as well.

In the past, there were two options to have fast internet connection in Luxembourg: PT line + ADSL or Eltrona/Coditel + ISP. As in our household, we had more use for the cable television than for the PT line, we opted for the cable television option in 2003. Now the situation has improved and Orange now suggests an ADSL service using the PT network but without the PT subscription. And it works!

So, I decided to cancel the subscription of Eltrona as well, suggestion a similar arbitration as with Luxembourg Online, paying for the service that I consume by the end of April. The General Conditions of Eltrona are much less in favour of the consumer, so in the worst case I may still have to pay the 2011 subscription.

By the way, on sunny afternoons the picture of the ELtrona cable TV is very bad in this address. This concerns particularly the channels at the lower range of the frequency spectrum (e.g. RTL Lëtzebuerg).




Only Luxembourg Online answered to my letter.In vain, because the answer was the wrong one.




Next, I will discuss the case with Union Luxembourgeoise des Consommateurs, an organisation that has been very helpful in the two cases for which I have asked their support during the last 5 or so years when I have been their member.

After that, I will most probably pay one or two of the remaining Luxembourg Online invoices and the subscription 2011 for Eltrona, or a part of it. And continue watching Caroline Maart behind random specks for another 7 months.

Luxembourg Offline 26 April and 1 May 2011

Luxembourg Offline – Winternet Surfing Season Over!

Two weeks ago, on Sunday 30 March 2011 Luxembourg profited from an extremely warm Spring day. On the same date Luxembourg Online lost a loyal customer that has done more to improve their quality than their entire customer service department, called notoriously “Service Contentieux”.

From old experience I recorded the signal level of the Motorola router and later the log files.

As a positively thinking person, I expected the service break to be temporary. It was not. In the last two weeks, Luxembourg Online using Eltrona cable network has been many times offline in Kaltreis during the sunny hours of the day. I really did not expect it to happen so quickly. This brought many puns to my mind when looking at the blinking leds of the router: Luxembourg Offline, winternet service provider, snow surfing from November to February.

On 31 March I signed a 12-month ADSL Flat Solo contract with Orange and had the first contact with their sloppy (unfortunately) marketing staff, promising immediate activation and a free WiFI Router when walking out of the shop. None of the two promises was true – the delivery time is 4-6 weeks. I hope their technical service will be better than their marketing – otherwise I will have to start still another consumer blog...

Economically changing from Luxembourg Online to Orange will be worth the effort. The monthly subscription will drop from €28 to €26. Orange will provide me with a free Zyxel WiFi router and a technician's visit. In the ADSL Solo there is no need to subscribe a PT telephone line – even if they use the PT infrastructure - which was the main reason I opted for Orange. And finally as a cherry on the cake, I can cancel the Eltrona cable television subscription. In 2010 this was as much as €186.08 per year (corresponding to €15.51 per month), including €57.10 + VAT for authors' rights.

Of course, the main reason for switching the service provider is not only economic. The Luxembourg Online service to this address is simply unreliable and their customer service, I cannot help repeating Service Contentieux – not too far from Service Contagieux, behaves arrogantly.

There is no free visit by an Eltrona employee...

My Eltrona cable Internet service has been stable for months now. I have paid conscientiously my monthly fees of 28€. Additionally, at the end of the last year I also received an invoice of €200 for the installation of an amplifier (that, by the way, did not solve the problem at the time).

This invoice I also paid, as the service had been stable since Autumn.

However, the current stability of the service, in my opinion, comes from one of the following two reasons:

• either Eltrona has indeed done something to solve the problem...
  
• or the problem has temporarily gone away because of the cold weather.

In the coming Spring and Summer, we shall see which of the two options holds true!

Luxembourg Online - now online most of the time

At the end of the summer 2010 I was rather unhappy with the service of Luxembourg Online. In order to improve the situation, I drafted a fairly comprehensive letter and sent it to the company by e- and snail-mail. In this letter, I told that I have stopped paying the bills until the service has been improved.

By the way, I have noticed that these Central-Europeans have a lot of respect for written communication, especially when addressed to the boss. It sometimes even seems that answering letters is the principal management system. And there is nothing wrong with this - once you know it, you can use it. Even if paying attention to the quality of service, motivating the people to care for customers and supervising the execution of work systematically might give better results than mere correspondence, especially in technical domains.

I got a swift reply to my letter, telling me that it is all my fault, because I had installed a cable to bring the signal from the cellar to my bureau.

I was not very happy with this answer, because I had carefully verified that when the problem occurred, it also occurred in the cellar when I attached my modem directly to the newly installed amplifier. Surely, the cable damped the signal a few dBmV, so in my bureau the service failures were perhaps more frequent than in the cellar. But they appeared in the cellar as well, I was sure of this.

Taking into account the efforts of Luxembourg Online to keep its customers, I found a good candidate for new ISP - Orange with their ADSL Flat Solo. Their monthly fee was two euro less than my current price, but I would need to have an other modem and a different cable.

This happened in September. I decided that next time when there were be excessive service cuts, I would switch to Orange.

Surprise! I am still with Luxembourg Online. Since September, I have noticed some service problems in the logs of the modem, but none of them has happened when watching videos online or using my VoIP telephone. In fact, the service has been online and I have been quite happy with it.

But perhaps, when the Summer comes and the strong Luxembourgish sun starts again roasting the Eltrona distribution boxes, the signal will fade away as it did last Summer. This time, I will go as well, without even starting any correspondence with the old provider. They have had their chance.

The problems persist...

Back from holidays! During the 5 days in July and August the service has been nearly reliable. I was able to do a couple f phone calls and pay my regular bills through the Luxembourg Online cable connection.

However, when looking at the log files of the last two days or so, it is apparent that the problems have not been solved:

* Friday - Saturday 20-21 August 2010
* Saturday - Sunday 21-22 August 2010

The next steps are as follows: First, I will refuse the payment of the July invoice - the example on this page show sufficient evidence of bad service. Second, I will contact the Helpdesk to see what can be done. The ultimate solution is to change the ISP and the technology.

Evidence based decision making

Between Saturday 26 June and Sunday 27 June I carried out the following test: I moved the cable modem to the cellar and plugged it directly in to Eltrona's coaxial splitter, with a piece of coax with plugs fixed by Eltrona at the time when the first installation was made. (The WiFI function of the cable modem is useless in the cellar, that' why I wanted it to be installed in my office on the 1st floor.)

The logic behind this exercise of evidence based decision making was as follows: If there are no interruptions while the modem is in the cellar, the problem is either my 75 ohm RG-6U cable or the connectors I had screwed to the two ends of the cable. If, however, interruptions still appeared while the modem was in the cellar, then changing the cable and fittings would be of no use.

After the installation, the signal levels looked even better than upstairs in a stable situation. The downstream signal was amplified by 5 dBmV, and 42 dBmV was the sufficient signal level to communicate upstream. On the other hand, in the stable functioning of the connection, the +/-0 dBmVa and 46 dBmV seem to be sufficient. Signal to noise ration did not improve from 34/35 dB.

After checking the logs in the next morning, the same old T3's were there: From 1.30 to 1.40 Luxembourgish time, the service was down again.

* Saturday - Sunday 26/27 June 2010

The conclusion is that changing the cable and connectors will not solve the problems. Either the disturbances come from the cable modem (which I doubt) or they come from Eltrona's side of the network.

On 25 June, a friendly employee from Eltrona called me. He confirmed that Eltrona has investigated into all components of their network and that they can see the service breaks, but that the breaks are not caused by their installations.

What can I say? I believe them, they should know. Hence the problem must be in my house, either the modem, the connectors or the cable -there are no other possibilities. Eltrona even suggested a on-site visit, which I had to postpone until September, the end of a busy period at work and some holidays.

To do something, I replaced to connectors at the two ends of the cable, to assure a tighter connection. Immediately after the change, the transmission signal levels were perfect, but then the service went down again. And the breaks continued all evening. In the morning of 26, everything was perfect again, at least for some time.

Next week, I plan to go to Eltrona shop and buy a new "double blindage" coax to replace the current one, bought from Auchan satellite receiver department a couple of years age. That MUST solve all the problems!

• Friday 25 June 2010


• Saturday 26 June 2010, early in the morning

Offline, again

Today again, I sent an e-mail to the helpdesk, reporting yesterday's service breaks. Previously, they phoned me back, not today. I have not received an e-mail response for months, telling that they have (1) received my problem statement, (2) telling the follow-up number for the "call" and (3) promising to do something - this does not seem to be part of Luxembourg Online's business culture.

What seems to lack in this holy union of Luxembourg Online and Eltrona is any sort of transparency. If it is so difficult to provide a reasonable service between 18-22 on working days, then just tell it!

As the log files of today tell, the service was down again around 17.30 local time. Who knows what follows this evening... And as so often, the connection fell again while I was writing this report!
Signal to Noise Ratio 22.5 dB
Power Level -13.3 dBmV
Frequency 0 Hz Down

Thursday 24 June 2010

Luxembourg Online - offline records

And so it started...

It is particularly annoying to have a failed internet service for the following reasons:

Bank transactions are interrupted before the transaction is properly finished.

VoIP conversations are cut by the failing ISP - correspondents think that I am living in a banana republic with smoke signals communications dominating the national data comunications market.

Service interruptions from 12 June 2010 onwards (if only the service availability allows me to update the site)

Saturday 12 June 2010

Sunday 13 June 2010

Monday 14 June 2010

Luxembourg Online and the cable service Eltrona reacted quickly and sent a technician for the morning of 15 June 2010.
Measurements and installation of an amplifier took 2 hours of the technician's working - and the client's free time. As a result, measurements showed acceptable signal levels: upstream 46 dBmV and downstream -3 dBmV and my connection worked. However, I rarely had problems in the morning...
The next day it started again: a service failure while paying my holiday trip. The upstream connection was lost. Downstream signal was -12.6 dBmV.
Why is the signal level changing so much? Is it the poor cabling I have inhouse (which is in a fairly constant temperature) or Eltrona's infallible cable outside? Or is it because the Motorola SGB900E is scanning different frequencies and at a busier time, the frequency found is more damped out than the one found during the off-peak period? Not as far as I can see: These two shapshots show that the signal level changes very quickly - and that the frequency for both channels is the same.

Reporting continues after the amplifier installation

Tuesday 15 June 2010

Wednesday 16 June 2010

Thursday 17 June 2010 seems to be a good day: No T3's or T4's, as far as I can see!

Friday 18 June 2010 and Saturday 19 June morning: the connection works since a couple of days as it should: snapshot signal levels are optimal (DS 46, US 1 and SNR 34), just one T3

Saturday 18 June in the afternoon

In the morning, everything was perfect. However, at 2 pm, the signal levels were much worse, even if there were no time-outs (yet): Downstream signal was damped by 9.8 dBmV and the modem was screaming at 55 dBmV upstream.
In the morning, it seems that I had the whole bandwidth at my disposal a speed test showed >7 megabits downstream speed, but in the afternoon, I had to share the capacity with another user.
Does this mean that my connection works properly only if I am alone on the line? Not only the speed is eaten by other users, but also the connection becomes instable.
Despite some moments when the downstream signal level was down to -12.9 dBmV, SNR close to 30 dB and the modem was pushing upstream at 55 dBmV, there have been no service breaks during the week-end. Still, the fluctuating signal levels are a concern...

Monday 21 June 2010

During Tuesday 22 June 2010 from 18.30 to 19.00 another service breakdown appeared. Could this be caused by the Luxembourg Online/Eltrona staff celebrating the Eve of the National Day - and ignoring to send some smoke signals, or another essential part of the hidden communication network between the client and the Internet?

Tuesday 22 June 2010

The party at Luxembourg Online/Eltrona seems ho have resumed: Several interruptions of the service have taken place during the National Day (see the link below). At 20.20, the signal levels are poor and the connection was lost. Happily I was not caught in the middle of a phone conversation this time. The simple conclusion is: This Luxembourg Online cable modem connection is far too often offline and it is very unreliable! The service breaks take place during the hours when it is mostly used (18-21 in the evening) and the helpdesk is also "offline".

Wednesday 23 June 2010