Advice needed! Poor signal with Orange. How to deal with them

MonsterMoshi · 27 Apr 2013 at 15:51

We currently have a small business account with Orange with four handsets and an iPad contract worth well over £150 a month +VAT.
We run the business from home where we get poor signal in most of the house and then zero signal in our office which is obviously the most important room
I have found out that orange do offer repeaters which i believe are these (or similar) but Orange have previously told me they are only avaliable to corporate customers.

Now we have had this contract with Orange for over 11 years and we have a very helpful third party orange shop in our town so ideally we don't want to move away from them. Two of the phones reach the end of their contract in June and i'm not signing another whilst i still have this issue.

I have spoken to a very unhelpful lady today and explained the issue and said that i will not be renewing the contract unless i can get this device but she did not seem to care about my business in the slightest.

What do you think my chances are at getting one of these through Orange and if it is possible what do you think my best way is to go about it?
Could you recommend any other solutions to the lack of signal which are not going to cost the earth?
Or if nothing else could you recommend another network which provides good service to business customers?

Cheers

Conanius · 27 Apr 2013 at 17:38

Don't you just need a cheap femtocell?

Three gave me one (to be clear, by gave, I mean totally free) as the indoor coverage for my iPhone was shocking at our old address. Worked perfectly, and just moved traffic over to my broadband service for backhaul to the CSP.

Subject to you having a decent, reliable ISP, it should be fine. I could have 10 devices registered on the Three Femtocell iirc.

MonsterMoshi · 27 Apr 2013 at 18:00

Essentially yes that is what i need
EE do them for small business as seen here
But Orange do not and refuse to do so for a small business customer. Highly frustrating.

Repeaters are available but there are clouds surrounding their legality and they cost upwards of around £200

Solutions like Vodafones sure signal and your device from Three see great but are reliant on good internet. EE's device does not.

Normally i have around 2.5MBs which should suffice in theory but currently it is almost dead at 0.4MBs awaiting an engineer visit on monday.

Conanius · 27 Apr 2013 at 18:10

Sounds like you could benefit from improving your home internet. I'm guessing you are on ADSL? Have you done the basics like have an ADSL filter faceplate, and try different modems? You might only succeed in getting more stability, but I believe most people see upwards of 1Mbit improvement in sync speeds using the adsl faceplate alone. I've just got a Draytek Vigor 120 ADSL modem for my new place, and that should help get the best connection possible.

Regarding the issue at hand though, if these repeaters are available through EE, I don't seem to understand what the problem is.. are they just saying your account isn't big enough?

MonsterMoshi · 27 Apr 2013 at 18:31

Oh this issue with out internet is that our ip profile goes right back down to the minimum whenever we have a power outage and then does not reset automatically.
They can manually reset it but that takes me at least 5 phone calls to BT to get them to sort it out so i've just booked an engineer to sort it out for good.
We already use a filtered ADSL faceplate installed from a previous engineer visit in january. I plan on replacing the BT homehub 3 though with a quality stand alone modem as i don't even use the Wi-fi. Is that Draytek a good alternative for my needs?

I have no idea why. I have enquired twice and they say that they are only available to corporate and public sector customers which i can not understand when they are available to small business through EE. I will phone EE on monday and see what they say.

However Vodafone seem to be able to offer me much more so i'm looking there.

Conanius · 27 Apr 2013 at 20:08

I have no idea how good the Draytek is personally as I'm still awaiting my phone line activation, but it is one of hte only modem only devices out there where you can use your own router (I have an airport extreme, and everyone says they pair great)

I'll let you know on 8th May when I go live (at last.)