For the last few months the service I’ve been getting on my Orange mobile phone has been getting progressively worse.

A few months ago I couldn’t make phone calls at all for about half a day and nor could I receive any.  #1 son’s phone was the same, so was Mrs Sane’s and so was the work phone I had – all on Orange.  All the phones had a full signal but they wouldn’t make or receive calls.

I called Orange off my landline (an expensive call) and they couldn’t tell me what the problem was.  The work phone came back on before our personal phones – to be expected, they use QoS on their network.  But this was the first indication that something was going seriously wrong with Orange’s mobile phone network.

Since that time, the service has become increasingly poor.  When trying to make outgoing calls I would often get connection errors, network busy messages or just simply timing out without making the call or displaying any errors.  This could happen with a poor single or with a full 2.5G signal.  I took Orange’s advice to change the phone from 3G to 2G temporarily and this improved the service greatly but I use a lot of data so it wasn’t a proper answer to the problem and when it started happening even with 2G manually selected, I decided enough was enough.

Over the past few months I have spent hours on the phone with Orange trying to get to the bottom of this problem.  Several times I told them that if they couldn’t fix the problem it was fine but that I expected them to end the contract early so I could change to another provider.  That’s pretty much where the sympathy ended and I had some interesting conversations with people at Orange about this.  During one call I was told that there was no real difference between 2G and 3G data connections – in reality it’s between 1.8mbit/sec and 3.6mbit/sec, depending on the state of the network where you are.  On another call I was told that it was impossible for Orange to cancel my contract early and when I pointed out many times that the terms and conditions they continuously quoted at me as an excuse to keep taking my money without providing the service I was paying for said that they could, in fact, cancel my contract whenever they wanted for whatever reason they wanted, the woman hung up on me.

The problems happened mainly in busy built up areas, generally not rural or sparsely populated areas.  It also generally happened during the day, not at night.  I’m not a mobile phone network engineer but I’m a pretty techy person (alright, I’m a geek) and over the last few years I’ve gained quite a lot of knowledge and experience of networks and communications infrastructure.  To me the cause of the problem was pretty obvious – not enough capacity – but trying to get someone at Orange to admit that their network wasn’t able to cope with demand was a seemingly impossible task.

But it wasn’t impossible because, with the help of a couple of nice men from Orange’s off-shore call centre in India, I managed to get a call escalated to Orange’s networks department and on Saturday a very helpful man from Orange called me, discussed my problems and agreed that it was lack of capacity on the network and that it couldn’t be fixed.  He agreed that the iPhone was the trigger that has brought the network to its knees just as it has done with O2 and said that it may get better when they start merging their network with T-Mobile in a year’s time but they just don’t know at the moment.

It was a refreshingly honest admission from Orange and they agreed to end my contract immediately, allowing me to change providers.  Co-incidentally, there was an announcement on our company intranet today that Orange have come clean to my employer about their network problems and staff are even being offered second phones on a different network by the company where problems are particularly bad.  It may just be a co-incidence but could my call on Saturday have been the trigger for an open admission by Orange that their network is basically buggered?

I was on the phone to Orange customer services today to see if there was a cheaper way of getting my son a small amount of internet access.

I was disappointed to find that not only was £5pm the cheapest option for data, but new customers would only receive 250mb for their £5pm, rather than the 500mb limit that has been available until recently.  I was considering adding the data to Mrs Sane’s phone package but 250mb for £5 is even worse value than the already poor offering of 500mb.

I assume that Orange is aware of other networks’ offerings and how Orange compares to them.  Let’s have a look at what’s available elsewhere:

Vodafone charges £5pm for 500mb – double the new allowance you get for the same price with Orange.

O2 charges 50% more than Orange but in return for the extra £2.50 you get unlimited data unless you have an iPhone or a 600 minute package or above in which case you get free unlimited data and unlimited access to their network of wi-fi hotspots.

T-Mobile offers unlimited data for £5pm and Three even gives 100mb per month free with a £10 pay as you go top-up as well as free Skype to Skype calls!

This is a backward step from Orange and as I said, disappointing.  I’ve been an Orange customer for 13 years and recommended it to many, many people over the years.  I even had a job selling Orange mobile phone contracts a few years ago!

The high cost of data on Orange is a real let down and after visiting a Three shop yesterday and seeing how cheap their packages are I think I know where I will be going when my contract is up.  With a roaming agreement with two networks, their poor coverage isn’t a problem any more and most new phones are available on Three so it all comes down to price.  For a £10 pay as you go top-up you get free Three to Three calls, free Skype to Skype calls and 100mb of data as well as 50 minutes of voice and 100 texts.  Contracts are even better value.

Orange has the resources to match that offering but refuses to do so.  It’s a shortsighted move that’s cost them an extra bit of business from me yesterday and when my other 3 contracts with Orange are up next year it’s probably going to cost them those too.