Many thanks for all your informative responses.
Struggling to reply to each one as still no service.
The link to list of masts out of order was very helpful and guess what, the one nearest to us is out of order!
I drove to the mast which sits on top of a water tower expecting to see a swarm of Orange engineers vans but nothing.
Once again sat at the bottom of the garden typing this from where I can get an intermittent 4g signal.
Orange have given us a 200 gb boost but that is useless when we cannot get a signal.
Our contract is 140go which gives us all we need and more if we continually hotspot for 4 weeks with pkenty to spare as we have done when in our camping car so another 200gb is useless. We were offered an air box but without a 4g signal that is useless tooand we would have to do a 100 kilometre round trip to collect one.
So we watch and wait to see if normal service is resumed today but I somehow doubt it.
When I moved to my house full time I had to get a new line installed, which had to be done by Orange as all the other providers just shrugged and said it would take them months, and couldn’t even give a timeline. Signed up with Orange, they duly installed a new line, and then I went on for months and months, about 9 in total by the time the issue was finally resolved, but I persisted and did not let them off the hook. I had every call and engineer’s visit logged. Knew just about everyone in the Tunisian call centre. Every time the engineer came we always ended up having quite a laugh at the lack of Orange’s capability to sort issues, as he kept being sent to look at the connection in my house and every time it was ok. So I also finally wrote to the Orange France CEO, recorded delivery, with the catalogue of issues and demanded a refund for the whole period where the internet was unstable. The internet worked, but not constantly, which was the great frustration. Soon after that I was contacted by someone from an ‘escalation’ customer services department and I was refunded the full 8 months. It was then another one month before they sussed out that there was an issue at the local exchange, which they duly fixed, and then I was also refunded that additional month. I switched to Orange’s low cost offering Sosh as soon after as I could, and now couldn’t be happier with the service. Only one issue reported since, which I think was after a storm. An engineer came out promptly to discover a line had broken in the road, which he fixed immediately! Persistence pays!
I’ve recently experienced a similar issue. We have a holiday home in Brittany and visited in late May during which we installed some Ring security cameras. A few days after returning to the U.K. we noticed that we were no longer receiving videos from France but not being there, we weren’t sure whether we may have had a power cut or a problem with the Orange wifi. We arrived for our August trip and found we had no wifi so after doing the obvious attempts to fix, I called Orange to report. I was informed that the issue was outside our property and that the fault had occurred at 3am on the 30th of May (which tied in to when the videos stopped). We were told an engineer would come in 4 days. On the day nobody showed up but I was eventually told that an engineer had been and was unable to fix the issue but another team would come a week later. Given that would be 48 hours before our return to the U.K. it wasn’t ideal to say the least but there was nothing we could do. The fault was eventually fixed without us being made aware until 24 hours after. My husband asked how it was fair for us to have paid 3 months charge when there was no service and was told there would be no compensation until the date we reported the fault! I find that totally unfair! I intend to complain to Orange (I’m not sure where to start with that!) and consider moving to Sosh who I understand are a low cost provider (still using the Orange network) as I know we are paying more than we need to.
Essentially Sosh is still Orange but instead of phone support it is online, which I found far more efficient actually 
Not very useful now but, if you install the Orange app on your phone, you can check the state of your service remotely and report faults.
This thread might help you. For me, this worked. They refunded 100 euros.
Hi @JohnBoy - sorry to hear your issues with Orange, our neighbours are also in same situation and cannot get any feedback from Orange as to what is going on!
Dreadful customer service.
Perhaps of some interest to the SF community, is that we bought Starlink and it’s been so easy to set up and give super fast (250mb) service. So easy and I see they now have a special offer on of €199 for the kit and €40/month !!
It really is awesome internet so far.
R 
Can only recommend Starlink. Fast and competitive. See topic on improving internet speed wih our personal experiences. One neughbour with Orange. Orher with Free. Neither working
Now day 10 without service. Called Orange again and now they are saying that the problem is beyond their control as the fault lies with another providers equipment that our Orange line gas to pass through. Latest prediction for reinstatement is now 1st September at the earliest!!!
Currently comunicating via smart phone some kilometres from home where I can get a signal.
Starlink. The offer of €199 and €40 per month sounds ok on the face of it but:
Surely it only provides internet services from the users home base so a mobile contract would still be needed in order to have a contactable phone number?
A french mobile contract that enables you to ring UK landlines is very expensive so does Starlink somehow allow you to ring UK landlines?
Does the €40 euros per month give unlimited internet access?
I have had experience of satellite internet prior to switching to Orange some 7 years ago and found it ok but with many limitations compared to my Orange contract, when it is working!
Sounds exactly the same as a response from BT in the UK. time to find an alternative. Maybe mix internet and mobiles? What do you want you want to achieve?
We’ve been through all that too. No end of extra GB but mostly useless because our 4g is also useless. But Orange keeps trying to sell me a new 5g phone…
Yup!
Since our service was lost we have had sms messages a plenty trying to sell us super dooper this and that package that will revolutionise our lives.
We just want our current package restoring!!!
And this yesterday evening.
I did disconnect our live box although it was pronounced dead 10 days ago!
Correct, Starlink is purely an alternative to the Orange broadband. You could use Voip based solutions for a contactable mobile. I have just ported a Three UK SIM number to Xpatfone (Devyce). It enables me to call and be called on my UK mobile number whilst connected to wifi or on 4g (I have a Sosh SIM for France calls etc).
Yes, unlimited internet access - currently i get an average of 200Mbps down and 25Mbps up on Starlink
This post will have no interest to those who benefit from all today’s internet technology offers, or that of a simple land line. Without even thinking you will enjoy the benefits nany times in a day. The world is now Almost totally dependent on all the communications systems at our fingertips.
Imagine you had all this taken from you on 16th August and today the 6th September you are still without.
Your provider gives you extra megabytes so that you can hotspot from your smartphone but what good is that when 4g can only barely work from the bottom of your garden.
Orange say it is out of their hands as the problem is with another provider?
It seems the problem is affecting an area in the Dordogne and they still don’t know when it will be fixed.
I am told we will be compensated when the service returns but until that day arrives they cannot calculate how much.
Enjoy your wifi, internet and all that comes with it.
I am being shouted in for tea now so am walking ba k up the garden into no mans land.
I bought my first mobile phone in 1983, it was like a brick but probably could do more than my phone can do today.
Get connected Get Orange.
Tough one John in this modern world. Just managing your expectations though. As I think I mentioned above, took friends of ours TEN WEEKS. Same issue - Orange and Free - each blaming other - not a good scenario. Frequent trips to MacDonald’s was their solution.
This is one of the things I struggle with in France.
A provider wants to wash their hands saying it’s another company’s fault.
Yes, from a personal point of view I sympathise that they can struggle to get that other company to do what they should.
But the French presentation of this seems to imply, that they have no legal responsibility for the service they provide, including subcontracted services or other services (like mast use) they pay for, that have affected the service they provide to me.
Surely this cannot legally be the case. I am really surprised so many big companies, even ex-government enterprises like Orange, seem to present this as though they are not legally responsible and should not have to make right and compensate.
I’d really like to know the legal position, as compared to my own Anglo expectations that a company is responsible for providing the service they have contracted to provide me with.
It’s why I’ve never been overly keen on this sort of artificial creation of a “free” market with one company providing infrastructure (and therefore typically one removed from legal responsibilities to the end user) and then multiple “providers” offering service using the infrastructure.
Too much chance that, should there be a problem, the network owner and your retail privider will each be pointing the finger at the other leaving the customer as piggy in the middle.
Trouble is, only a nationalised company (e.g. GPO/ France telecom/SNCF/British rail/EDF etc ) could afford to put the infrastructure in in the first place. Deregulation while creating competition, can create problems. After using some of the alternatives, I went back to EDF and Orange. Orange is probably more expensive than its competitors, but I don’t think you can beat the EDF tempo tarif
There are actually multiple operators laying new fibre in the UK but it tends to be something of a monopoly or at least an oligopoly in each location - I have a choice of BT Openreach or CityFibre locally but not, say, Hyperoptic.
Not sure that there’s much diversity in the French market though.