Me too!
Does that set-up provide Internet (and if so, any idea of speed) or just the VOIP phone connection
- Or not. I have a livebox and a VoIP phone from Vonage at £8.5 per month for unlimited international calls.
Trying to finalise my CV with photographs, the latest hold up, and sort out my taxe habitation and a few other things but must get round to checking out what I am actually getting from Orange. If the old live box had let me link to the iPad and Kindle no doubt I would still be sailing along with the old out of date contract and been a lot happier with the payments.
go thru your account settings and see if they have given you what you signed up for..
speak to the english help line for good assistance,, i must admit, i had to speak with them for another friend who was paying Orange twice.. one bill for 56 and another for 48 pm.. the guy on the english help line was really helpful and discovered there were 2 accounts running for the same household.. one in my friends name, the other in his deceased wifes..and had benn for a long time.. stupid long time as it turned out.. and he received an 800 refund.. yes,,800.. to say he was happy is an understatement.. the helpline guy even cancelled the double contract and set up a single deal of around 30 pm.. they can get it right..
We have a good mobile signal here as the Autoroute mast is only about 100 m away up the hill behind us. However wi-fi is another matter as we have very thick stone walls between us and our Gites. Last year with the old white box we had guests camping out right outside our place with a multitude of iPads/iPhones and variants thereof. The 'new' black box appears to transmit a bit further, which is nice.
Thought that was what I was signing up for at 33/34€ a month but not what I am getting. It seems that they moved me to a mobile scheme just because I purchased a Pay As You Go sim card for my iPad, which I have never used, as being Scottish I look for Free Wi-Fi wherever possible, at the same time as signing up for the new deal.
Umm.. sorry.. i stand corrected on resilliations.. they were year contracts.. now you pay 49€ to escape.. metinx..
also.. when my friend signed up to Orange Zen.. the deal is for 33€-ish.. after initial offer period.. but there were extras on her billing for "Gigamail" and something else that escapes me now.. but it added a few €uros to her bill that were not wanted.. they're now terminated..
I was originally with Free when ADSL became available in the village because of the free international calls. After a shaky startdue to a faulty part that cost me 40€ in phone calls, I had 3 years of good service but the day there was a problem with the line, I found myself caught between Free and FT and had no service for over a week. Since then I have moved to Orange and have never had a problem that wasn't sorted in a couple of days, I even once had a call from a high level techie on a Sunday morning.
To "escape" from Orange (landline, internet), you don't need to give any notice of cancellation. You sign up with your new provider (SFR, Free, Bouygues, etc.) and they take care of that part. Tick the right box, and you get to keep your old phone number. Eventually you need to return your boxes to Orange, but that should be it.
We are Orange customer (landline, internet, TV by satellite) in an area "non-dégroupé", so alternatives are not that tempting. Orange is good, however. Internet speed in 10Mb/s download and 1 Mb/s upload (we're 200m from the NRA). During the 5 years here we have had to exchange the Livebox 4 times and the TV box once, but the customer service has been fairly good, sometimes even excellent. Mind you, I speak enough French and I'm able to take them into the technical details right away. Once I was even referred to 3rd level technical support, and the guy was tremendously helpful.
Also, I think it helps when you carefully, very carefully, study what Orange (or anyone else for that matter) actually offers, including all the details about special offers for the first 12 months, lock-in period, technical details, etc. Never assume they offer what you think they offer or what you want, unless you can verify it in their brochures and contracts.
when was the start of the contract?.. it's normally for one year.. then you're free to move without paying the unused remaining contract.. some telco's offer up to 100€ to pay off your exixting telco when you go to another.. a friend left phone expat and went to orange, they paid 100€ of the last bill from expat.. just an aside.. phone expat were obstinate in saying my friend needed the "Safety line" at 16€50 pm on top of an expensive call plan,, [ 30 minutes and re-dial or be cahrged 1€ per minute]..
you MUST teminate by registered mail.. they WILL NOT acknowldge or accept snail mail, email or nuclear bomb.. only registered mail will get you out of a contract over here.. they have 10 days to do something from the date they receive the reg letter,, so send well before the next billing date.. or you pay for the next month,, even tho you're off their system.. i've been with Club-internet.. who were bought by N9euf.. who became SFR.. been happy for 6 years now..
Does anyone have any idea on what sort of notice of cancellation you have to give to escape from orange? I thought it was grim being without service for 8 days but reading some of these posts we were lucky. Our initial 2 year contract ran out in May 2013 but we just kept going (no communication either way) until I tried to connect the new iPad and Kindle to the old white livebox a year ago. They would not connect no matter what I tried. Both worked OK in the local wi-fi bar.
Went down to the Bordeaux shop for the 'deal' at the end of last year to reduce the total cost for, line, internet, tv and mobile and to get the tv recording box and the new black live box (had been informed that the iPad and Kindle would connect to this with no problem and such turned out to be the case) all for less than I was paying at the time, according to the brochure.
Costs have risen phenomenally since, instead of going down, and no recorder supplied without paying extra (informed of that by telephone not in shop a week later) and although connection is still good with the iPad and Kindle through the new black box it keeps turning itself off with regular monotony. This is a real pain, literally and not figuratively, as the computer is upstairs and the box downstairs and the combination of my dodgy knees and our dodgy stairs does me no favours, especially if my wife is not handy to do the reset. A definite you win some, you lose some situation.
The 'music' on the 'english' "helpline" drives you barmy and I have frequently given up on the call because of this as there is only so much pain one can take whilst holding on. If and when you do get through the response can vary from good to downright appalling, which includes the classic "I cannot help you with that, call the 'normal helpline'". If my French was up to it I would have done so, but as it isn't this is why I called you on the 'English Helpline'. Incidentally, why is this 'service' not available at the weekends anyway? Do they assume as 'Brits' we all go "home" to the UK at weekends or something?. We don't, we actually live here!! When is the greatest use of the internet? I would suspect at the weekends. So when help is most likely to be required it just isn't there. Orange are not the only ones guilty of this omission by a long shot, I must admit, both here and back in the UK.
Yes... I have internet and ip phone contract with them. Second month I get an email saying my new facture is online in my espace. It wasn't so I emailed them to tell them... They don't provide internet support by email (only sales $-/ )...
So I rang them... most of you know what the experience of a french telephone maze (menu?) is like but after a few random presses I get through to someone but they just refer me to the web page (no nampy pamby English support for me - I have a business account!). Comprehension is difficult but eventually they refer me to the English help line who say they can't help me and that I have to contact the business support line.
Weeks pass and several calls later I eventually arrange a telephone rendezvous get put on hold and line dropped three times. Give up... 5 hours later a phone call suggest I visit the web site to view my list of invoices. 6 hours later another one and finally, 7 hours later acknowledgement that its an error and they will email me a copy but thet invoice will not appear in my history - apparently its beyond the ability of the Orange IT wizards to use a database. Perhaps they can't email their support line?
All seems well now, apart from the 15€ premium line support charge!
What do I get for having a business line? afaics just the same as domestic (except for alleged 8 hour guarantee of line problem fix... oh and a non-English premium help desk). Mainly I get a static IP.
Don't know if I'd recommend Orange - now I know that I should schedule a support call for them to ring me and accept the fact that they will alwasy assume I've done something wrong...
How do they compare though with Free and SFR? At least though, like the rest of French bureacracy, its not personal, afaict everyone has the same terrible service.
sfr tripleplay - we pay sfr and we have no relationship with orange/FrenchTelecom.
I think sfr might pay something to orange
Does that mean you have cable? I was under the impression that France Telecom/Orange own all the posts and wires.......
No I am sfr throughout. I was just explaining how femto worked for me.
(Que choisir says orange have better cellphone coverage in general.)
when we were on hols in the lake district last year my french portable generally worked whereas for our many brit companions coverage was very patchy, so yes I agree they should allow roaming. I think it would be ok to charge 1p a min extra or something like that.
Reading between the lines, it appears that you are paying SFR for Internet, fixed phone and mobile (and possibly TV) as well as paying Orange for line rental. So the "free lunch" is beginning to look like small beer in the light of your probable monthly bill.
In the UK, they are talking about forcing providers to share masts in areas where there is poor coverage. The technology still has a long way to go.
I got a femtocell from SFR at no charge and it does what we want.
How it works. It is in effect your own tiny (thus femto) cell mast, it actually sends and receives normal 3G cellphone signals over a very short range like 10meters or so.
You connect it to your wifi at home. You tell sfr on the espace client that you want it to connect to sfr portable numbers 06nnnnn. now every time somebody calls you as part of the attempts to find you it sends a ring signal through the internet to the femtocell which then sends are you there? inside the house (or vice versa if you want to phone somebody). My phone instead of displaying F-SFR shows FEMTO.
It's made all the difference.
My neighbor was delighted with the service he had from the Orange engineers who came and fixed his poor reception problem in about 5 minutes flat, wished him a good day and went on their merry way. But I am quite prepared to accept that his experience was not typical. Orange is known to have a high staff suicide rate, so unless their HR people have a policy of employing the clinically depressed, one can only assume that there is something terribly wrong at senior management level.
Never heard about Femtocell and would have assumed from the name that it was for pregnancy testing. How does it work? Is it any good?
They don't seem efficient at all, quite bizarre really!