Orange Mobile Internet banjaxed ?

Fireblade96

I've been very pleased with my new HTC Desire, but now Orange have rather spoiled the party by having broken their mobile internet. Since yesterday. Totally. With no promise of a rapid fix.

I had an illuminating conversation with customer support:

me: what's up with your mobile internet service
Orange: the server's down
me: you mean there's just one server ?
Orange: no, there's more than one. But this one controls the other ones. Our best engineers are working on it.
me: but I use this for my work email. It's a business critical service
Orange: we're very sorry. We can guarantee that it will probably be back within 24 hours
me: "guarantee" and "probably" are words that shouldn't be used in the same sentence.

I could go on...

What shocks me above everything is that there is no information on their website about the problem, it's estimated fix time, or any apology to affected customers.

Grr...

Fireblade96

Hah! It seems the news has finally leaked out:

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/mobile-it/2010/08/19/orange-data-network-suffering-outages-across-uk-40089870/

jonginge

Dave Gorman was complaining about it yesterday:
http://twitter.com/DaveGorman/status/21512894598

DaveGorman wrote:

Orange Mobile 3G service down for most of the day. No service announcement. Nothing on the website. Patronising customer service. Bad form.

Bassjunkieuk

I'm also one of the (un)fortunate people who relies on Orange for their company mobile but I can't remember seeing to many issues with it yesterday. The company I was working with tho (a rather large IT outsourcer) also uses Orange and they had some rather high-up people phoning into the account manager......

Thankfully my Desire on Virgin was working fine :-) Now all I need is for September to hurry up and arrive so I can get Froyo without any technical hackery.......

The Rookie

Its not the Orange mobile network BJ, its the data (internet etc) Network.......

Simon

Citizen Smith

Data network was down for 24 hours - appears to be back up again.

@Fireblade - I had a striklingly similar conversation with a technical support rep. He said they had put a notification on the IVR but I have to say I didn't notice it. No ETA to fix either.

For something as serious as this, they should have texted all data users (even just business customers) or at least put a notification on their website.

Fireblade96

As of this morning, it appears to be back up.

@Citizen: for me, the data network went down Wednesday and was still out at midnight.

I've worked for a number of vendors to the mobile telecoms industry, I've run a customer support office, and I know that if Orange were my customer and my kit was down, the first thing they'd expect was decent communication : where the problem is, what you're doing to try to fix it, estimated repair time.

Shoddy customer support, Orange ! Thankfully I still have my work Blackberry (on VF) and I'll be hanging on to that as backup...

gtvlusso

Techie Techi!!!

Fireblade96

gtvlusso wrote:

As an ex- Orange employee, working in technical support on "some" of the intelligent network and data services......I could not possibly comment......

It's been a few years since I worked in a technical role, but let's think : I could get GSM access, make calls, send text messages, but couldn't even connect to the 3G network.
=> AAA server, or access to it, was down.
These things are meant to be resilient & redundant, there should be no single point of failure, so whatever went wrong was big - I expect human error.

Actually, well done to the technical support guys for fixing it, but the customer service director should be shown the door, today.

gtvlusso

Hmmm - techie techie techie!

Headhuunter

I used Nokia Maps on my X6 yesterday evening at about 11pm yesterday and it worked fine. Doesn't that require data?