We just changed to Orange. My advie is to avoid at all costs - they made a real mess of the transfer.

... and my ADSL is slower than ever :(

Telefonica the lesser of evils?

could you fill us in , More about what happen
thank
jurdy

Try Jazztel. Supposedly they’re one of the fastest ISPs in Spain - in fact they are, apart from a few private networks.

Right

Sorry it’s taken so long to reply.

Where should I start - it could take a long time! This is a summary:

We contracted them to take over our business lines (3 of them all with ADSL) - we’re a web company so we told them that we could not afford any downtime as our business depends on it - they told us there wouldn’t be downtime.

The following day after agreeing, all 3 ADSL lines and telephones were down. We contacted the technical department and they told us that the new lines would not be enabled for another 2 weeks. This went on all day as we kept on calling them as we didn’t really believe this. Eventually, after nearly a full day offline we spoke to somebody that said “no, no, your lines are already working, you just need to change the username and password of your router for our systems to recognise. It was only because we didn’t really believe that it could take 2 weeks to change this over that we persevered calling them all day. I dread to think how difficult it would have been if we were not able to converse in Spanish.

Well we finally got connected (their customer service is far worse than Telefonica) - unfortunately they made the following mistakes:

1. disabled our fixed IP address on which we rely for server configuration to be replicated to our web-server.
2. changed the lines from being in the business name to my personal name so I couldn’t put calls against my business returns.

Number 1 still hasn’t been resolved (after 3 months) and number 2 took around 6 weeks to solve.

Worst still, the ADSL is much slower than the Telefonica service - granted you can pay slightly more to have a faster connection but I don’t see why I should pay more again to get something that is at least as fast as telefonica’s when their base speed is advertised as the same speed as Telefonica.

I could rant a lot longer but that is the basic gist of it.

Hmm, interesting to know. I hadn’t heard anything so terrible about Jazztel before, but I think you don’t need to go far to see how many people have complaints against Telefonica.

How’d they get permission to switch you from a business to a personal client? That makes no sense.

If you’re going to get 3 ADSL lines (which is smart btw), why not get one from Telefonica, one from Jazztel and one from ONO! Total redundancy!

The Expatriator - 31 July 2008 06:24 PM

I hadn’t heard anything so terrible about Jazztel before

No, you got it wrong. the poster originally was talking about Orange, then someone started talking about how good Jazztel is, and the original poster explained himself about Orange.

I TOTALLY agree - Orange is the worst.  Its crucial for me to have internet at home all the time for my work, and I asked them million times before changing if its going to take a long time to change provider. the operator said 3-4 days, well it was like 2 weeks offline.

Then they had once in Barcelona some problems with certain stations, and I was offline for 3 weeks!
its like a really bad lowcost airline, if it works from the beginning - its ok. but if you want to change something or you have problems - it takes forever to solve the problem. their support line is the most annoying experience ever, nobody knows anything.

I changed to Jazztel and cant be happier.

1. faster internet. I can see by downloading stuff.i have a maximum tariff of 20 megabit. Orange calls it 20megabit as well, but its “up to”, and it was always slower than Jazztel.
2. best support

the change from orange took about about five days (officially all providers say up to 20 days).
i recently moved to a new place, they did everything within 3-4 days - offered new line for free, and installed internet. very fast.
besides unlike orange Jazztel dont “rent”  telefonica’s lines, so you dont have to pay “mantenimiento” to telefonica when you have Orange.

So i definitely recommend Jazztel.

Hiya

Thanks for clearing that up Ed - sorry I haven’t been checking replies as often as I should.

Right - Orange - we’ve finally had enough and are switching back to Telefonica.

Never managed to get my line put into my company account - and thus never managed to get a fixed IP address (though I don’t fully understand why I have to be a business to have a fixed IP address).

In the middle of all this about 2 months back they promised us a free trial of their television package that comes over the ADSL line, then took 70€ our of our account for the priveledge of this free trial which they refused to get back because apparently it should have been explained to us that there was a set-up cost - free trial huh!!!

Anyway - we finally decided to go back a few weeks ago - when we started the transfer back we had 2 false promises from Orange that they would get our line into the company name and apply the IP address - the last time assuring us that it would be done within 24 hours. Also had offers of free phone calls for a year.

So we’ve gone ahead with the transfer and Orange have cut us off before Telefonica have recieved the request to take the link - Telefonica tell us (and I well believe it) that they are not allowed to do this. So now we have no internet at 2 of our offices.

I must say that in all this, Telefonica have been most helpful - the engineer even giving us his mobile number - though there isn’t much they can do until they receive the transfer authorisation.

My strong advice would be to stay well clear of Orange - they’ve been the worst company that I’ve ever come across in Spain - in fact, I’d say their customer service is even worse than NTL used to be in the UK which is saying something!

We’re still calling Orange up trying to get them to do things properly but it’s like bashing your head against a brick wall.

Rant over!

I think lot of companies have their good and bad sides, customer service is a real big disaster generally in Spain. I have had and read about different companies who, for some have been excellent and others terrible. I think it is very hit and miss whether you will get a good service from anyone.
I have friends who are very happy with ONO, I had a nightmare, I have had a very good experience with Tele2 but know of other who haven´t.
Spain still has a lot of catching up to do in certain areas, especially customer service, and not just in telephone and internet services, how often do you get a grumpy waiter or a bank clerk who doesn´t even look at you and answers the phone in the middle of serving you? I could go on!

Hi all   ...  when I needed a telephone and broadband line putting in I came across the usual problem in Spain. Ask five people for their recommendations and you get five contradictory answers. You are guaranteed to end up more confused.
In the end I asked the advice of the proprietor of one of the area’s biggest web design companies, and a Torrevieja company; the longest established British run computer / communications company in the city.
The advice from both was yes, Telefonica is not up to BT standards but it is not that far behind them. They are certainly the best of what is out there.
As a consequence I signed up to Telefonica. I have never had a problem and I have found their customer care service simply couldn’t be bettered. The problem seems to arise when irritable English speakers sound off. Well, if they do they will get a back-lash wherever they are. It is human nature.
Just ring 1004   ...  keep hanging on until you get the ‘English’ service. Be polite. There won’t be any problems.

Hi all ,

Sorry to hear of your bad experiences. I am doing a project all about the customer service recieved in Spain. If you have a story to tell please take a look at my blog and post a comment .....

http://customerbleurgh-vice.blogspot.com/2009/11/customer-service-does-it-exist.html

Thanxs

We can’t get ADSL here so we don’t bother with Telefonica.

I do wish Movistar would stop ringing me every single day though!!