I think mik was referring to SFR Jane. ISTR your issue was (is) with Orange.
Did you at least get your rental reimbursed? We did after I wrote to their CEO. A very pleasant âŹ104 arrived back in our a/c.
Sue, could you message me with the address of the name and address of the CEO please?
You never know.
Sue, give me the CEO details as well. I fought to work from home in France and issues like I had yesterday is not good. It can happen anywhere but SFR is big and it should have a disaster recovery site like most companies in the UK have, there should be no down time for its customers.
Still totally unacceptable John. I canât for the life of me understand how this could happen other than due to Inadequate fire protection/suppression and inadequate failback. Thatâs one thing in a companyâs own datacentres but for a hosting/outsourcing provider itâs just not on. Itâs a very low margin business and itâs all too easy to put off adequate investment in these areas. Heads should roll.
CEO address:
M. Richard, Stéphane,
Orange SA
78, rue Olivier de Serres,
75 015, Paris
This was the thread where Vero helped me with my letter of complaint.
I have found SFR 4G to be pretty acceptable where we live now, but their DSL was totally sh#* in my previous house and I moved back to Orange after SFR left me with no connection for 6 months then set the legal dogs on me when I refused to pay!
Are you working for a UK company but from home in France?
Hi,
Just signed up a couple of weeks ago to SFR internet and TV. Internet is OK - 520Mo - in the middle of the city, and a guy came and put in co-ax up to the 5th floor.
But the tv doesnât work at all - digital rights management error - wonât display video on the (2007) TV. Then after numerous rebooting etc I got it to work Thursday. Then it powered down and now it wonât reboot al all - at least I know it was capable of working, so not rushing to buy a new TV.
A woman in the boutique said to call 1026 - the international help line - but when I got home it didnât connect em to anyone - a greeting in English, then a message in French, malheuresement Iâm not good enough to decipher that. Iâll be back down to the shop next week and hoping their claim to provide assistance there, mask to mask, will be bourne outâŠ
Itâs the race to the bottom for hosting companies / service companies. I worked for Intelâs hosting company (lasted about three years before they decided to concentrate on core business), they sold to another competitor and the new company very quickly removed all the expensive Cisco kit and replaced with cheaper in terms of cost and on going maintenance cost. The new equipment did not have the redundancy that Cisco had and they also removed some of the resiliency in the network design. None of their customers were told and they just hoped for no issues.
Similarly, I was TUPEâd from Deutsche Bank to HP and the same happened, less staff and very rapid redundancy of the ex Deutsche staff in favour of offshore. DB have now realised their error in wanting it all for less and have stopped spending on the outsource deal and are in fact doing a lot back in house.
Dead right Peter.
IMO IT has been a serious of fashions since I started in '76. Though I started on IBM mainframes Iâve lived and worked through all the cycles. From the old bureau days to the in-house days (led largely by âinexpensiveâ midrange machines, DEC PDP, IBM System/3, etc.) and then through distributed systems and then back to centralised server farms with LANs and now, once again to distributed applications under the new moniker of âCloudâ. The only thing that really changes are the buzz words, the theory stays much that same.
Having watched the cycle for thirty years the one (minor) regret I have is that I knew Salesforce was going to be a hit, it caught the distributed wave just at the right time as outsourcing, having been kicked off thirty years earlier by GM with EDS and Ross Perot and IBM Global Services following, was peaking. I just knew it but, as usual I was too busy to actually do anything about it. My other prediction was in the late nineties that Linux would proliferate but that wouldnât have been as lucrative a bet as Salesforce.
IBM is dumping itâs outsourcing wing, once the real revenue generator for the Corporation, itâs a commodity business now. Given the core and key nature of IT any sensible company will keep control and multi source to niche players IMO.
Iâve TUPEâd a fair few in my time and itâs a challenge, for both parties. When we acquired PWC consulting their local partners seemed confused as to who had acquired who. I fixed that lickety-split 
Not for a minute suggesting itâs acceptable, but saying how dependent all our lives are on technology networksâŠmost people understandably do not realise the huge effect on them if there were to be a global or even major country outage for any length of time.
In the mid 1980s I was involved in computer leasing with Philips, they decided they couldnât take on the emerging technology of applications and programmes being hardware agnostic, at that time software house wrote bespoke programmes for our hard ware and standalone word processors (!) We pulled and I wrote off about ÂŁ55m of leasesâŠa lot 35 years ago.
And who remembers the scandal of Atlantic computer leasing?
Leasing has always been a mystery to me John. Though I know a few folk from the old days that made a bundle out of it through cars and planes. I think Ireland is the plane leasing capital of the World now. I wonder how thatâs working out? All seemed like alchemy to me 
As does this car personal contract hire or whatever itâs called. How do they work out the residuals?
Yes, but last long with these outages. Itâs my first month. Came here as my son was sick and hoped to stay with until at least July.
In simple terms a lease is a contact to rent somthing for a period, sometimes with right to pull out with penalties in the period. If you have the option to buy at the end its call lease purchase/PCP also traditional HP.
Where as a pure lease has no buy rights but sometimes offers a lower rental after the original termâŠbut within these there are many flavours.
A lot of leases particularly in the 1980/90s were leases in which the provider (lessor) calculated he could re-lease the kit to a second user (using a capital value at that time) so the first lease did not recover the full original cost.
If at the point when the kit was available for second lease the market value was below what the lessor had originally assumed then the second rental would not repay the remaining capital. This is what fundamentally led to the demise of several specialist leasing companies (incl Atlantic) âŠie they assumed in the second lease they would recover say ÂŁ50k capital value, but if the market value of similar kit had fallen to ÂŁ40k then no user would sign a deal that values it at ÂŁ50k. Outcome: lessor never gets the original capital amount back that he paid to buy the kit to lease out.
âŠand within that there lots of flavours and tax implications
Yes, thatâs what I find confusing with car PCPs John. The low rentals would indicate very high residuals. The first three years are when cars take the greatest depreciation hit and the PCP costs I see advertised seem low to even cover that.