My Origin connection so far

[circle of shred]

yawn.

customer not employee

happy one as well.

[Hippojay]

I'm glad your happy - however spare a thought for the rest who haven't been as well looked after as you appear to have been. That was all too obvious by the number of facebook and twitter posts.

I personally took my business elsewhere. The way I saw Origin conduct themselves told me that this wasn't really a company that I wanted to deal with in the future. You may counter that i'll get the same sort of service elsewhere, but as you've illustrated above, peoples experiences of service can differ. If I'm not valued as a customer, then I'm not going to be a customer for long.

I'm all for supporting local companies, but they still have to provide a level of service like every one else. They shouldn't take this for granted just because they are based in the local area..

[circle of shred]

theres always a very LOUD minority who will complain. the silent majority chilled out a little. waitied and are probably all sat on the net right now.


it just appears that the admins on here are using this as their own personal speakers corner. and to the one to told me to f*** off.

keyboard warrior! fancy saying that to my face?

Spenceruk. there is NO DRL anymore. so no need for a DRL forum. this will wither and die way before Origin does..

[Hippojay]

If the silent majority chilled, then what are you doing here then? Shouldn't you be chilling with them?

What motive do you have to evangilise so strongly?

[jonohanson]

(26-09-2014 06:26 PM)Hippojay Wrote:  If the silent majority chilled, then what are you doing here then? Shouldn't you be chilling with them?

What motive do you have to evangilise so strongly?

Get ready for a new FB post from Origin 'We are happy to announce how well our Business is doing, and how great our Cust service is, we have even hired a new starter C. Shred'

[circle of shred]

your all so convinced your right you cant see the wood for the trees.


there are thousands of happy customers who have very little to comment on. i just like t shout out for them. you have all had far to much to say. doom and bloody gloom merchants.

why should i need a motive? what motive do you all have for predictint the death of an isp?

[Hippojay]

Dude, I think you need to chill a bit!!

No one died from a little bit of criticism!

[mirdragon]

what have I missed here....

For starter's this forum was put in place to help end-users who were experiencing issues and for others who wished to praise and recommend the ISP's they were with. All the ISP's on the network also had the ability to post information and respond to customers.

Origin decided to stop posting on this forum and Sheffield Forum around May so the only way customers could get some form of information from them was via Facebook or Twitter even though they had the ability to post on here and SF where they knew a lot of their customer base resided and were active.

Origin were not forthcoming in any relevant information regarding the closure and even when asked openly about this, they were still very cagey about what was happening. The likes of ASK4 who took over the customers from RipWire provided information in advance and warned all the customers what was happened and managed to migrate customers away before the closure so they did not loose internet.

Did Origin do this? NO - Did they keep their customers informed? NO - Did they make false promises? YES - Did they let their customers down? YES - Did they delete genuine posts on Facebook? YES

It doesn't matter what failures happened with other companies like Openreach or Thales. The reseller is Origin and they had an obligation to their customers to provide they with the correct information of what was happening and should have had a contingency plan in place. They should have started looking at this on the initial announcement of closure and started migrating people as early as possible, especially if they had their own network in place.

For what Origin were doing they should have been working towards ITIL and also ISO 20001 which based on what has happened they have not and have a long way to go to achieve these.

If I get my services via Sky and requires and engineer due to fault on line and they don't turn up I would complain to Sky not BT as I am a customer of Sky. If Sky said it's down to BT or whoever I would say I'm not bothered about them as my contract is with you. It's the same if a customer calls and they say sorry we busy as we are understaffed, again that is not my problem that is the providers.

Overall Origin failed to provide the service that a customer was paying for, simple as that - will they recover nobody knows, but the way they are still going on about it they may not recover - but they have a long path to walk and a huge mountain to climb to get back the respect they used to have from the forum members on here and sheffieldforum as well as the users whose posts were deleted or blocked on facebook

So if you want to continue trolling on this forum and disrespecting the admin and also other forum members, then be warned I won't hesitate to ban you immediately

But if you have something constructive to say and willing to take criticism then by all means feel free to post...

[alexatkin]

The problem is you can't do an IP ban as you would also ban almost every Origin customer thanks to CGNAT.

Not that IP bans are worth doing, thanks to proxy servers and VPNs.

[beermatt]

Hi all

Just wanted to add some weight to this argument, and further ruin Circle's feeble attempt at defending of them. Not to be offensive to Circle, everyone's entitled to their opinion and it's only fair that someone tries to stick up for them, but I get the impression you don't know the full story. Sometimes there's 2 sides to an argument and it's all a bit grey but in this case it's pretty clear that Origin have been absolutely terrible.

Before I start with my experience let me give you some background - I'm a computer technician and have worked in the industry for 14 years, I know how poor BT Openreach are and I'm no stranger to ISP problems. Often the poor ISPs get unneccessary abuse when it's Openreach's fault and I defend them. To be fair to Origin, they have been screwed a bit by BT Openreach, but their own handling of the situation has been awful.

So my story...

I was an Ask 4 Digital Region customer, who incidentally I can completely recommend. They gave an absolutely great service, but have unfortunately stopped doing resedential services so couldn't offer a replacement service. They were however very very helpful and up front with detailed information about the DR closure.

So I started looking for replacements. I didn't want the week's downtime associated with a cease and reprovision, I use my internet for everything, including an online backup of my local PC, remotely connecting to work, and have pretty poor broadband data signal where I live so not much alternative. So I looked into this migration to ADSL route. I asked round a few companies and it was clear the moving off DR thing wasn't going to be straight forward, but several offered to try the migration and I was hoping I could switch onto ADSL pretty seamlessly, but knew there was always a risk of a few days downtime.

After looking round, comparing prices etc (bad time to move, with the recent FTTC upgrades across the country, ISPs seem to have gone back to being very stingy with data allowances) there were several options, Origin being in the running. I thought I'l go with Origin - I like to support local businesses, they seem to have a good ethos, average prices, and as they have lots of DR customers already stand a better chance of getting the migration onto ADSL right compared to a company that's never worked with DR before.

So I phoned Origin and said I wanted to migrate to their ADSL - I had a MAC code and everything and was ready to go. But the salesperson at Origin said no don't worry they have a plan to seamlessly transfer all their Digital Region customers onto another fibre service. The phone call went on for a bit with me re-iterating multiple times that I might be better going down the ADSL route because I didn't want to risk the downtime of a cease ane reprovision etc, but no they asssured me they have loads of DR customers and don't worry a plan is already underway with BT to get them all seamlessly migrated accross. All I had to do was transfer my DR connection to them first, and come switchover day everything will be peachey. They can't promise no downtime, I might be offline for a few hours during the switch but that's all.

6 weeks. SIX BLOODY WEEKS I'VE BEEN DOWN!!!! Not the "little to no downtime, a few hours at the most" that I'd been promised.

I had options, I had alternatives, I originally wanted to migrate to ADSL. Months in advance before Openreach were inundated with the thousands of DR connections all going down at the same time. Origin clearly lied through their arse to me, and to what end I don't know because they clearly didn't have a solid plan, and lying about something like that is obviously not a way to get or keep customers!

Origin's incompetence and lies didn't stop at mis-selling it either....

False promise 2: I couldn't get through on the day it went down unsurprisingly, gave up after about 10 mins on hold thinking no problem something's obviously gone wrong, the lines will be flooded with people complaining, I'll patiently let them fix it. Next morning, no email from them either about the outtage, that's strange. Is it just me? Nothing on their website. Still coudln't get through. That afternoon I had to find out what was going on so I sat on hold for a long time....

Got through and was shocked to find out it might be down for up to a week. I rely on my internet, I have things to do. If they'd warned me it was going down I could've made sure evertyhing was up to date beforehand, ordered a Giff Gaff data dongle, and generally planned for a week without internet. This was going to be a nightmare.
False promise 4: But I patiently waited the full "up to a week" I was promised, still nothing. Still no emails, still nothing on their website, in fact at the time there was a big green light on the support page saying "no service issues at present"!! Phoned again, yes they're waiting for BT to remove the tags, it's going to be another couple of weeks. :-O Kicked up a bit of a fuss, but there's no point making the poor guy on the end of the phone's life a misery, I made it quite clear about how poor Origin's communication was, but I know what BT are like so I just asked them to keep on top of it.

False promise 4: A couple of more weeks passed, the maximum promised, and still nothing. Making a total of 3. No letter of apology from the MD on the website or via email explaining the situation and reassuring us that they are doing the best they can and putting the blame completely at Openreach's doorsteop. Nothing. Not a phone call with even an update. So I chased it again - still awaiting for BT to remove the tags. I didn't get a date this time but I was told "as soon as BT have removed the tags it should only take a few days to get an engineer booked and then I'd be back online".

I started to chase fairly regularly now, out of pure desperation. It's the year two thousand and ****ing fourteen, people need internet. All my bills and legal stuff is done by email, all my friends use social networking to keep in touch, we live in a paper free world to save the environment so we don't keep maps, phone books, paper copeis of documents, etc etc, everything is online. I'm an outdoorsy kinda guy I do sailing, canoing, etc; ride a motorbike, prefer talking to ppl in person than typing on a computer, I'm not someone who locks themselves in a room and never sees daylight. But we live in an online world, life revolves around it now, times have changed.

False promise 5: Anyway in one of those phone calls (of which all I should point out I was being polite and respectful throughout) I was told they had put me on the fasttrack list, and chasing was a good idea, it's given a kick in the right direction shouldn't be long now. And finally on Monday the 15th I get a reply to one of my emails - the tags have been removed wohoo!! FINALLY some progress, I know it's not over yet, but that was the big obstacle supposedly - tags have now been removed Again asked them to keep me updated but nothing.

More bad news: Phoned to chase several times at different stages and was assured the order was with BT, just waiting for an engineer now. Finally TWO WEEKS after being told the tag had been removed, I chase it again, and a day later the person I spoke to came back to me to say she placed the order yesterday - so what happened to the one they said they were going to place as soon as the tags had been removed?? But the order has come back today and said the tag is still on the line, must have been an error on Openreach's system when it was originally said it'd been removed. They've asked for it to be removed again, but six weeks in and many false promises later and we have no idea how long it's going to be now.


So while Openreach are largely at fault here, Origin have really landed all their customers in it. Let me point out the multiple failures on origin's part:

First fail: They had a full year since DR announced it was going down. A FULL YEAR!! Whatever their migration plan was they should've started it straight away. If they left all of them to the last minute this was obviously going to put a massive strain on Openreach. They needed to start moving people early, gradually.

Second fail: By a month to go their super seamless migration plan must clearly have started to look a bit ominous, so they should've started with contingency plans. Starting to move customers off asap, migrating to ADSL, sending emails out, etc. But no they decided to leave everyone in the dark and do seamingly nothing about it even at this late stage in the day. They were going to leave it until the very last minute without any remedial action.

Third fail: A day or two before DR shutdown, it must've been clear without any shadow of a doubt to Origin that customers were going to experience downtime. Maybe even a week before but certainly a few days before or at the very very least 1 DAY BEFORE. At that point an email shoudl've gone out. All ISPs I've dealt with in my experience sends emails out warning of major operatoins that might cause downtime. They should've emailed their customers warning of a long impending down time so we could start ordering mobile dongles, doing updates, and making ofline copies of stuff, etc.

Fourth fail: On the day. Absolutely no excuse for this. On the actual day itself, they were getting flooded with phone calls but yet again no status message on their website, and no email going out to inform ppl. We were all left completely in the dark as to what was going on. Which incidentally only made life worse for them because it meant more phone calls.

Fifth fail: Within a few days afterwards their should've been an official statement from someone high up in the company apologising, explaining what had gone wrong and what they were doing to fix it. Explaining in as much detail as they could about the circumstances surrounding the problem, and reassuring customers they were doing all they could to resolve it. For an outtage on that scale it is shocking that there was no apology, no official statement, nothing.

Sixth fail: No updates. Ignoring the lack of official statement & apology for a minute, their should've at least been a technical update, informing us of the overall situation and scope fo the problems. Teling us what the response was from BT Openreach. Ideally individual updates to each customer, but if not at least a central one (email, website, etc) keeping us up to date with the situation on a whole so at least we knew where we stand and had a rough idea how long it was going to be down for.


If you think this is a little bit biased and a little bit emotional, YOU TRY BEING DOWN FOR SIX WEEKS WITH NO END IN SIGHT AND SEE HOW CALM YOU ARE ABOUT IT!!!

Worst thing is god knows how long it is before I'm back on now. Six weeks and the tags still apparently haven't been removed..... is it going to be another 4 weeks before the tags are removed? Then another 4 weeks for to book an engineer appt? Where does it end! I might be quicker moving house than waiting for this to come back up! I'm starting to make alternative arrangements for everything now including mobile broadband, traditional disk based backup, changes to my work schedule as I can't provide proper out of hours support which is probably going to cause a lack of earnings, etc; but none of these are suitable substitutions. Maybe for a week or so but not for this kind of timescale.


It is poor, as always, that BT Openreach have no accountability. You can't complain to them, you can't even complain to Ofcom any more. BT Openreach have a complete monopoly and are a total mess of a company. Again I've worked in the industry for years, and know how bad they are, have had many small businesses lose thousands of pounds from long internet outtages, and us poor technicians are sat in the middle having to face the wrath of our customers and not being able to do anything about it. I work for a large retailer now, and they're no different, again massive disruption to the business and lost earnings because it's simply not practical to put a leased line in every shop and the only other option is a regular BT connection. They have a complete monopoly and answer to no one. It would even be better if it wasn't privatised, even government run organisations aren't as bad as BT Openreach, at least they have to answer to the voters!! BT are a law to themselves.


That does wind me up as well, but lets make not mistake about this: Origin cannot use BT as a scapegoat. This was avoidable, it didn't have to be this bad. We had options, we had a year's notice. Origin could've done something about it, they've lied multple times, haven't apologised or released any official statement, and their communication and updates throughout the disaster have been none existent.