Orange *****
With lockdown well and truly in place in France we have started to order more items via the internet. Well, we are trying to. We hadn’t Realised that pretty much everything you do online needs you to provide a French mobile number and, because we still have our UK contracts running, we haven’t moved over to a French one yet. ‘Simple’, I hear you say, ‘just set one up’. Exactly what I thought, and thought the simplest way to do this was to add it to our broadband and landline facility via Orange. One of the excellent services from Orange is that they do offer an English speaking helpline. So I contacted this to discuss our options. I spoke to an extremely helpful lady about needing a French mobile added to our account, however, she proceeded to discuss how to fix the issue we didn’t know we had on our landline, by suggesting we needed a new livebox, which, apparently, I would need to go and collect from a local Tabac. We went through what was needed, confirming that there was no cost to us. When I then asked again about the connection for a mobile she advised she was not able to help me and I needed to speak to someone in their commercial team. That is when things started to fall down. I rang them, but nobody answered the phone. So, not to be deterred I went online and spent some considerable time deciphering the best deal via the Orange website. I picked one out for us and progressed to applying for it, only to find the last (necessary) field in the application was ‘Please supply a French mobile number’. Was that not what I was applying for?!
After reading the application half a dozen times, and coming to terms with the fact I was not going to make this happen without a French mobile number ( I’d even ticked the box ‘Do NOT have an existing number’), today I have applied for a ‘pay as you go SIM’ from Lebara, which is only active for a month. Once we have that I will go back to Orange and order again.
The upside to all this – because there is one – is that our internet speeds have gone through the roof. Brian tells me that our upload speed alone is now 36x faster than it was a week ago.
