Orange is without a doubt, the worst broadband provider I have ever come across.

To begin with, some bright spark decided to move technical support to India. When a user calls up they get an Indian call center worker with an impossibility heavy accent reading from a script.

While this does make for some funny moments, most derived from the inability of the operator to speak English (I was once told the system was under "upgradation"), it is mostly painful.

For the last two weeks my broadband has been down, after calling Orange every single day I have been told to call back in 24 hours no less that 9 times. This all stems from the fact that the Indian operators have no real power, if an engineering team had not logged an update in 48 hours they simply tell the customer to call back, instead of requesting an update from the engineers.

A more serious problem is that they are highly arrogant, and almost borderline rude. One had the audacity to say "You wouldn't understand the problem if I explained it". If reading from a script wasn't bad enough, reading from a poorly written one is awful.

All Indian workers are instructed they have to end the call with the same question. So a conversation can have a rather surreal moment when you say "So you are telling me that you cant fix the problem for another 4 weeks!". "Yes. Is there anything else I can do for you today?"

Orange is a cheap and horrible company, there is nothing good about them. Their broadband speed is among the slowest in the industry, and worst of all 20% of their upgrades to the LLU network are believed to fail.

The company hides behind its Indian help desk, and won't even give you another number to complain to.

More recently they have announced a deal with PC world, where you get a £300 laptop if you sign up with Orange for a 24 month contract. 24 months is excessive! Trust me, while the deal may look good on paper, in reality it is waste of time, you will find yourself without broadband more often than not, and paying to call the pathetic mess they call a help desk.

In summary, if you are with Orange, then I can only pity you. After threatening them with legal action they agreed to cancel my contract. I will be transferring away from them as soon as possible, as well as cancelling my mobile contract with them. I have no desire to ever do business with this company again, in fact, I intend to actively disuade others from doing so.