So I saw the other day kevin bacon advertising how EE was a brand new network and opened hundreds of “new” stores all over the country and even in the paper how this “new” network had launched and was formerly known as “everything everywhere” well Im sorry to burst that bubble but these are complete lies. EE was never commercially launched as everything everywhere, however that is what EE stands for. In actuallity however it was formerly known as orange, who I believe were owned by BT, they are still exactly the same company and all of these “new” stores are just rebranded orange stores with exactly the same staff, owners, and useless customer services.
Why such useless customer services, well other than the fact that orange had built up a bad reputation around here for being terrible you must add to the fact that thier “email customer services” were down for over a month, 2 months before this relaunch as EE for all I know they’re still down but I gave up trying to deal with email as it was down an unreasonable length of time, so I tried twittering orange, however this mostly got ignored and they eventually responded far too late as I’d already visited the store by then to attempt to deal with my issues, however this was rather fruitless on the mostpart as well due to the fact that I have had to visit 5 times and still it is mostly unresolved.
My first issue was I had purchased a dongle off thier website to use on a temporary basis, which arrived unactivated and unable to activate in the countryside 13 miles from anything so I had to visit the store to activate it and this was claimed to be a security issue to prevent other people running up the bandwidth charges however no checks were made on my identity that anyone who recieved the dongle in the post couldn’t perform (address and name which was printed on the dongle receipt)
So my main issue, I switched networks from 02 to orange due to thier promise of £30 free credit, provided in 3 £10 matched topup ammounts, however I never recieved this upon my topups so I have been complaining, first they stated wait 14 days which I did, then I returned and they claimed I had recieved it and used the entire £10 credit in phone calls exactly to the penny on numerous 0 second duration phonecalls. However knowing that I had not placed any phonecalls I queried this, and it was stated that I had made 21 0 second calls to one number and 13 to another, all with 3 minute gaps between, cross referencing this with my texts sent and recieved I noticed that it was actually the signal that my phone would send back as confirmation that it had recieved the text from the other party and not phonecalls however they have used this as an excuse to not provide the credit they are supposed to and are quite clearly breaking thier promises here and this is definately illegal. If they investigate the supposed phonecalls on the same level they will see that one of the numbers was gabrielle C (full name redacted for security) who is also on orange and there were not phonecalls at this time but instead texts from her to me and these 0 second calls were confirmations sent back to her phone of the recieved texts, and every 0 second call stated on my account is exactly the same.
However orange, t-mobile and EE (if they are BT then them as well, however I’m uncertain of that this is just speculation due to thier association with BT openzone although that is now known as FON) are all associated with this as they are all now one amalgamation of a company and are all illegally making promises they wont keep and are doing everything and lying to refuse to payout. They refuse to make proper checks to see that what I am stating is correct which it is and thier customer services will fob you off and even hang up on you during the conversation rather than sort this issue out when it is known that these are definately not phonecalls but are associated with text services where no charges should’ve been applied remotely. I even caught the customer services agent out by sending a text while he was on the phone and asking him if there were any calls and he said yes but then after I pointed out it was definately a text he corrected himself from saying it was a 0 second call to saying it was a text message.
I would advise that you stay clear of EE, they may be the only providers of 4g at the moment, however others will shortly get permission to use the bandwidth and at a much cheaper rate and a more reliable service with far far better customer service agents who dont ignore you and fob you off along with lying, only take 4gEE if you’re happy to be lied to and stolen from. (This is not slander due to the fact that this is exactly what orange/EE have done to me)