Have you checked your physical address on arcep ? Although our village has fibre, there are a few addresses not connected here, so it may be the same with you.
That’s where I checked. Can’t find my way round ariase so don’t know what they said.
We’ve had problems with our phone line/internet since August and were offered an Airbox for temporary internet connection. The problem lasted several days and service was returned for a couple of weeks but it went down for a few days again. When phoning the English speaking Helpline they told us we could use an Airbox (it is a free service for 2 months). We went into the Orange shop to collect it. So after a few days we got the internet back … until September 18th. The whole of our village (according to the Helpline 748 households were affected) has been without any service since then and it is expected to return by today (8th Oct) at 1800hrs. We have nothing but praise for the Helpline. We told them we should have returned the loaned Airbox by 5th October and they have extended our usage until 5th December and every time we checked on available data, they gave us another 200GB.
But …
If the standard of service that Fibre will give us is anything to go by the standard of work along roadside with the phone poles and cables is to go by, then we don’t hold out much hope for continuing service through the coming winter months. There are lines hanging down, lines tied up with string, lines crossing the road to another pole only to return back to the original side. Some poles (supposedly new ones) have snapped in half due to the weight and number of cables attached to them. It is a complete shambles.
According to Orange/FT website when we put our phone number in the search area to check the availability of Fibre it says we do not qualify - although it does say "Fiber is coming to your neighborhood. Fiber is coming near you" Yet our friends who live half a mile away as the crow flies have not been affected by the current outage and apparently they were being connected to the fibre network.
So we are really not sure what is happening. The current outage is shown on our Client Area on the Orange website as being fixed by this evening. Anyway, as we’ve said we have nothing but praise for the Orange Customer Service staff - I know I wouldn’t like their job at the moment for a thousand euros a day! They have phoned us when they said they would, they empathise with us and appreciate how difficult it has been, they are offering a reduction in this months fees plus compensation so we could not ask for more (except to have our phone and internet line back I suppose!)
So if copper is being phased out and we can’t get fibre then how does that leave us?
We are currently using a Livebox 4 with unlimited usage for the internet. We did try a 4/5G connection earlier this year but you only get 200GB of data per month. We use more than that so after two weeks decided the offer was no good for us and returned the unit. We don’t need a package that includes TV - we don’t have one. It’s only the phone and internet we need.
Just a thought though - why cant they use towers (like the mobile phone towers) for wifi connected units so no wires are needed! Probably out of the question but we thought we’d mention it …
We are so confused with all of this. We don’t like change at the best of times, especially at our age. All we want is to be able to use a phone, and be able to use the internet at a decent speed although we can cope with our current download/upload speeds. We aren’t all that technically minded and although we do more than bumble along, we’re not ‘top of the tree’ on this subject.
Some of you are - and we very much appreciate your input/guidance.
Yes, that’s quite a good site - I’ve used it a few times.
On would hope that for any given location currently served by copper it won’t be taken out of service until fibre is deployed.
Though I suspect this won’t be absolutely 100% and some may be left with 4/5G as their only option. Well, there’s Starlink, but it’s not cheap and might not be future proof.
Update:
Well, we didn’t get the internet back last night as promised, nor did we receive a call from the Help Line Agent, which is the first time they haven’t called us.
The information on our Orange account says that the incident is not fully resolved but does not give a date for resumption of service.
Oh well, maybe we’ll get a call later today.
I hope you’re keeping a note of all this. we had a Christmas when we were without Orange for 10 days, except for the odd moment when they tried to reconnect, as someone on a building site had put a pick axe through a main cable. When our line was restored I contacted the Orange helpline to reclaim the rental money for the 10 days to be told I should have notified them on day one and there would be no money forthcoming. Since it was damage that affected a whole area I could not believe they didn’t know when it started. I also pointed out that since we had no landline or internet and it was a mobile phone deadspot I had no means of contacting them.
A subsequent letter to Orange’s CEO got 100€ back in our account - so worth doing.
Since the installation of fibre we’ve had no problems (fingers crossed).
Thanks @SuePJ - we have been promised a refund on our bill for the days we’ve been without service but if they’re not as forthcoming as we would like on compensation, contact with the CEO would be our next step. What contact details do you have for the CEO please?
Thanks, Rachel x
Headquarters France:
Try him:
Executive Vice President, CEO of Orange France
Jean-François Fallacher began his career in the late 90s.
Orange are quite good at letting you have details of their business on Google.
That’s extremely unusual - most large companies seem to go out of their way to hide all contact details ![]()
Indeed they do. A few years ago I had to do some debt chasing of a UK double-glazing company who owed me money for a photography job - their website contained no phone numbers at all, and my contact who had booked me was no longer responding to emails.
Fortunately, Companies House records included a head office phone number, so I called that and asked to be put through to accounts.
My second stroke of luck was to speak to a girl who had just started working there, who processed my payment straight away.
The company went into receivership about 10 days later. ![]()
Not because of your photos, I presume?
A plausible suggestion, but nope.
I think it was because of their lack of success at selling double glazing. ![]()
My humble contribution was to photograph a lady whose house was being featured in one of those “before and after” makeover PR campaigns.
In August I ordered a newly published book from a small independent UK publisher and patted myself on the back for not doing it via Amazon despite them offering fast, free delivery. Payment was immediately taken from my UK card but after a couple of weeks I still hadn’t received a shipping notice, so I e-mailed their sales. No reply, then car crash admin then slowed down the follow-up.
Last week finally phoned them and got a young female Oxbridge graduate(?) on the line, who apologised profusely, then said (really!) “I’ve just had my morning coffee, so I’m a bit hyper and I’m frightened of saying something silly, so I’ll email you when the book’s been posted.” (!)
That was seven days ago…
She obviously hadn’t had her Weetabix ![]()
I’m curious. How did you know she was an Oxbridge graduate?
Most of them are in publishing - also there’s a certain air - a sort of throwaway confidence…
I doubt her type do Weetabix, probably something from God knows where what’s been fermented (or excreted by some exotic animal) - or simply espresso and cocaine (I always fell for the latter)
Same subject - but an update and another question:
Today we had confusing messages from Orange. We had an SMS and also an email to say that our internet connection had been fixed. So hubby plugged the Livebox4 in but the message on the screen said there was no connection. We rang the Helpline and they said Sorry - it was an automatic message and has been sent in error, your line is still not working and your service will be resumed at the end of the day on 15th October. (We’ve been without a connection since 18th September and are currently using an Airbox on loan).
We also had another email to say that we now have Fibre available to us and it gave us a comparison of what we had to what we could get in future by choosing Fibre. So currently our contract costing 40.99€ pm gives us unlimited internet usage with Livebox 4 and free phone calls to France, the UK etc.
Our question is: will the usage for the phone and internet only, not TV, be the same for the Fibre (which will be Livebox5 costing 42.99€pm ) as we currently have with Livebox 4 with the copper line.
We know we could get this information from Orange Sales Department but we wanted to know the ‘true’ answers from people who already have the system up and running.
Can anyone give us this information please. Thank you.
Personally, I think Fibre, or the lack of it, can make a world of difference…
how this equates to financial costs will depend on the company one chooses and how they behave…
![]()
no doubt all will be revealed in time…
That is expensive. Go to Sosh (which is still Orange) & save over 10€ per month. We pay 30,99€/mois. The service is limited to 300mbps but that is more than adequate for most people.