Tag Archive for Orange

High speed mobile services coming to the UK

September 12, 2012 Geekery, Technology One comment

Orange/T-Mobile are launching a new 4G mobile phone service under the brand Everything Everywhere (EE), the name they gave themselves when the two networks merged.

4G LTEThere’s been a bit of controversy around the 4G roll-out though.  OFCOM, which is responsible for licensing the spectrum that 4G mobile networks will use, has given EE permission to use some of the spectrum it already owns to roll out 4G services ahead of the auction for the rest of the spectrum.  Other mobile phone providers reckon this is a bit unfair as they don’t have any spare spectrum and EE only have spare spectrum because OFCOM gave them a big chunk for free a few years ago.  They thought that was unfair at the time as well but nothing came of it.

Three make a bit of a fuss about the way the 4G auction was going to be run, saying that it gave an unfair advantage to the big four networks who already had lots of spectrum.  They have since done a deal with EE to run their own 4G services over their network.  It’s a logical extension of the mast-sharing deal they currently have with Orange.

The 4G launch will be an Apple-free zone with only Windows 8 and Android phones expected in the first year and although Apple is rumoured to be preparing a 4G version of the iBrick it might not work with EE’s network.

It does seem a little unfair that EE are getting to launch their 4G network early but while it gives them an advantage at the outset being the only 4G provider, they’re going to find themselves running a network on the wrong frequency with a limited set of handsets as a result.  They’ll buy more spectrum in the auction and then spend stupid money running the two alongside each other.  This fragmentation happens in the US and it’s a nightmare – you get entire cities with only one operator because the mobile network has been built non-standard and no other operator’s handsets work.

Whatever happens, the rollout of 4G can only be a good thing.  Fixed line broadband really has had its day – wireless has virtually limitless possibilities and can provide high speed data connections where laying miles of copper wires or fibre optics just aren’t an option.  The only thing that is likely to hold it back is divergence as a result of EE’s early adoption and companies spending stupid money in the spectrum auctions and not having enough cash to invest in building the new networks.

Orange admits to 69.5% failure rate on mobile phone mast

October 30, 2010 Technology 8 comments

The Orange rip-off saga continues unabated.  I eventually got Orange to disconnect my phone after a prolonged battle with customer services eventually got me talking to their network support people.  But I haven’t escaped Orange yet.

When I left Orange I changed to Three and it all went well for a couple of months until Three decommissioned a mobile phone mast near my house and left me unable to get a Three signal in my house.  And when you can’t get a Three signal, your phone roams onto Orange.  Same shit service at home, different name on the bill.

Orange, in their infinite wisdom, decided to turn off one of their masts a week later even though they’d already acknowledged a few months earlier that the network was congested.  If your car is running on 3 cylinders, you don’t take another spark plug out … unless you’re Orange.

Mrs Sane is still on Orange and tearing her hair out since they turned the mast off.  Since that weekend the pattern is the same – about lunchtime on a Friday you can’t make and receive phone calls or send and receive texts with any degree of reliability.  Most of the time it’s not possible to use the phone as a phone which is a bit inconvenient.  This goes on until Monday morning.

Mrs Sane complained to Orange and they agreed to release her from her contract if she wrote in to their head office.  She wrote in to their head office and I put a letter in the same envelope for #1 son’s phone which is also on Orange.  I haven’t had a reply but Mrs Sane got one denying there was a problem and insisting that their networks people said there is no problem.

The level of service is unacceptable.  I provide 24 hour cover for work every other week and the on-call phone is on Orange.  The last two times I’ve been on call I’ve had to give my house phone number to my employer because the mobile phone doesn’t work.  Mrs Sane can’t use her phone and neither can #1 son.  I can’t use my Three phone because roaming connections are dropped off first and neither can #2 son who’s also on Three.  My brother-in-law says that whenever he comes to Telford – and particularly where we live – he has the same problem.

Things came to a head today when Mrs Sane and I were trying to call each other this morning and couldn’t so I phoned Orange to complain again.  Five times.  It took about 30 or 40 attempts to make the five calls.  The first time a supervisor was going to call me but didn’t.  The second and third times I got cut off while I was on hold.  The fourth time I asked to be called straight back on my landline because I kept getting cut off but nobody called.  The fifth time I asked to be called back on my landline while I waited on the mobile and when they called me I didn’t bother wasting time explaining myself again and insisted on being put through to a network support person.

To my surprise I was put through to a network support person who was very helpful.  He checked the repeater mast at the end of our road and found that it was a bit poorly.  Well, when I say a bit poorly, what I mean is absolutely buggered.  The connection failure rate on that mast yesterday was 69.5%.  You haven’t read that wrong – 7 out of 10 attempts to connect to the network to make or receive calls, send or receive texts or use data resulted in a failure.  That is amazingly bad – a critical failure rate according to the networks person at Orange.  But according to Orange head office, there’s nothing wrong!

The nice networks man raised a ticket for an engineer to go and check it out next week.  He said it’s a line of sight repeated and it may have lost sight of a proper mast (the one they’ve turned off perhaps?) or just not be up to the job and needs cabling up instead.

It’s understandable that the first line support people don’t have access to that sort of information because they wouldn’t know what to do with it but it shouldn’t be so damn hard to get through to someone who can check out that sort of thing and deal with the problem accordingly.  I really hope they can sort the problem out because if I can get a reliable Orange connection at home, that means I don’t have to change from Three who I’m still really happy with, lack of connectivity at home notwithstanding.

Orange should have known there was a problem because that level of failure is just ridiculous but the big problem is people just accepting shit service and not reporting it.  If everyone who had a problem – and there are a lot of them – reported it they would have been more likely to have spotted a problem before now.

I’m not convinced that they’re going to fix the problem – certainly not in the short term – but let’s see what they say next week.  I am assured that I will have a phone call by Thursday at the latest to give me an update.

I need an Octeday

October 22, 2010 General One comment

It’s been over 2 weeks since I last posted, I’ve been neglecting the blog a bit recently.

So what’s been happening in the last couple of weeks?  Well, I went to the UKIP leadership hustings in Birmingham last week.  I’m backing Nigel Farage for leader of course, he’s the best candidate by far.  The second placed candidate, David Campbell Bannerman, is going down in my estimation every time he says or does something and I’m not the only one – I’ve had DCB supporters get in touch to tell me they’re switching allegiances since he got Farage pulled from BBC Question Time.

I’ve somehow found myself standing in for the Chairman of Brookside Improvement Group, my local residents’ group, while the Chairman recovers from illness.

The Campaign for an English Parliament’s new website is up and running.  We’re still tinkering around the edges but it’s there or thereabouts.  The latest feature to be added is a supporters mailing list.

There are a few hours left to take part in the competition over at Bloggers4UKIP.  Nigel Farage will be judging the best post published on Bloggers4UKIP by close of play today (October 22nd) and the winner will receive a signed copy of his book, Fighting Bull.  Anyone interested in taking part, use the contact form on Bloggers4UKIP.

David Wright has finally replied to me on the 500 RBS redundancies in Telford but fails to explain why he did nothing to stop the RBS policy of English Jobs for Scottish People when he was working in the British Treasury.  I asked for a meeting between him and the CEP, he’s told me to speak to his secretary to find out details of his open surgeries.  If he wants to play games, I’m happy to play along.

We’ve been doing the tour of the secondary schools again, #2 son is leaving primary school next year.  Hopefully he’ll get his first choice because it’s going to be a logistical nightmare (not to mention, expensive) if he doesn’t.

Orange are still pissing me off.  Unbelievably, a week after Three turned off their mast near my house resulting in me not being able to get a Three signal in my street, Orange did the same thing.  It hasn’t affected signal strength all that much but the already overloaded network is now worse than ever – from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, Mrs Sane can’t make or receive calls or send and receive text messages and my Three phone won’t roam onto Orange for most of the weekend because Orange cut off roaming partners when they’re overloaded.  It wouldn’t be so bad but I provide 24 hour cover for work every other week and for the second weekend in a row I’ve had to give my home phone number to work because the Orange mobile they’ve given me is useless.  Orange are now refusing to accept – despite having already admitted to me, terminated my contract early and paid me a considerable amount of compensation for refusing to admit their fault for months – that there is a problem with their network!

It’s been a busy few weeks … in fact, it’s been a busy few months.  I really must make an effort to blog more.  If anyone knows a way of slotting an extra day in the week I’m all ears.  Terry Pratchett has the right idea – I could get loads done on Octeday.

A Dilemma

September 25, 2010 Customer Services, Technology 3 comments

A couple of months ago I achieved a small personal victory against Orange who finally admitted that their network is struggling and terminated my contract early.  They’ve since agreed to pay me a quite reasonable amount of compensation for unreasonably keeping me in contract when they knew they couldn’t provide me with the service I was paying for.

So I changed to Three for a number of reasons, foremost of which was the value for money and the superior coverage.  For £32 per month I get a free network unlocked HTC Desire, 500 minutes of any network calls, 1000 minutes of Three to Three calls, 1000 texts, 120 MMS messages and 1gb of data.  On the coverage front, I get Three’s network which provides relatively patchy coverage nationally (but fine in the places I frequent regularly) and roaming access to voice and data on Orange – the largest combined coverage of any UK mobile network.

I have been more than happy with Three right up until last Saturday when my phone would no longer connect to Three and was stuck on roaming.  I assumed it was a local problem and after a few hours called Three to confirm they were aware of the problem.  They said there was no problem, it must be the phone and I should turn it off and take out the sim card, leave it for a few minutes and try again.  I left it overnight to see if the problem went away by itself but it didn’t so I tried what I was advised to do and that failed to fix the problem.

So I called again and was told it must be my phone and that there is a known problem with the HTC Desire that can cause it to latch onto a roaming network and be reluctant to move back to the home network.  I was told to take my phone to a Three or Carphone Warehouse shop and get it flashed to the latest version of the software under warranty.  The phone had updated that morning so I knew it was up-to-date but I reluctantly agreed to do as they said.  But later that day I went to a relative’s house and as soon as I travelled away from home, the phone picked up Three again.  “Ah-ha”, I thought, “that proves it’s the network”.

So when I got home I checked #2 son’s phone which is also on Three and his had the same problem.  I manually scanned for networks and it would only pick up Three on 2G – scanning with the phone set to 3G wouldn’t pick up Three at all.  So it’s definitely the network, without a doubt and I phoned Three back up again.  The person I spoke to this time told me that the mast by my house had been decommissioned and that they were currently working on the next nearest to upgrade it to take up the slack from the decommissioned mast.  This would take a couple of days, he told me.

Being a naturally suspicious person, I decided to go to the Three shop in town and check it out the following day.  I went, they checked and confirmed that what I was told was correct.  Brilliant, it’s not my phone and I just need to sit tight for a few days and it’ll be sorted.  Except it isn’t sorted because my phone still roams onto Orange as soon as I turn into my street and it’s been a week.  I called Three today to find out if the upgrade had been finished on the other mast – yes it has and there are no problems with any of the masts in my area.  You know what’s coming next don’t you?  I did and I sighed.

The handset faults person asked me for my software versions again and told me that I didn’t have the latest version.  I disagreed.  So did he.  He told me it was my phone and I needed to get it flashed.  I told him it wasn’t my phone and explained all the above again and asked him if he genuinely thought that it was all a co-incidence and that two different models of phone had spontaneously developed the same fault which only manifests itself in my street and started when they turned off the mast near my house?  He said it could be.  Clearly it isn’t.  This is what I do for a job – I diagnose and fix application infrastructure faults for a multinational IT company.

The aforementioned handset faults person got his supervisor to phone me back and we went through it all again.  He didn’t try and blag me the like his colleague did though and agreed that it was Three’s fault.  He offered me a different handset or to terminate my contract without charge.  As I’ve already proven it’s not the handset with #2 son’s phone, the only option is to terminate the contract and go elsewhere.

But here’s the dilemma: my phone works in the house, it just can’t get a Three signal so it roams onto Orange.  If I’m on a call when I turn into the street it invariably cuts me off as it tries to keep the Three signal for as long as possible and ends up cutting me off because it’s too late to switch the call to Orange.  And I came off Orange for a reason – the network is overloaded and unreliable.  But I won’t get the deal I’ve got from Three if I go to another network – I won’t get the data, the free calls or the coverage.

Obviously Orange is out of the question so that leaves me with T-Mobile, O2 or Vodafone.  We’ve dabbled with T-Mobile and it was nothing special and then they built a new mast at the end of the road and the signal nosedived to the extent that it often wouldn’t work indoors.  So that leaves O2 or Vodafone.  Having worked for a mobile phone dealer, I know that Vodafone’s upgrades are shit – you have to spend quite a lot of money with them to get a decent upgrade when your contract is up so that leaves O2.  But O2 have overloaded their network with free data packages to the extent that their network in London was pretty much knocked out earlier this year for weeks.

So now you see my dilemma, what should I do?

Orange admits their network is over capacity

July 26, 2010 Customer Services, Technology 5 comments

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?

The Future’s Bright, the Future’s … expensive

November 20, 2009 Customer Services, Technology One comment

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.

Details, details …

October 17, 2009 Customer Services, Technology One comment

Orange has this clever feature when you ring customer services where you enter your password on your phone keypad – 2 for abc, 3 for def, etc.  It’s a great idea, assuming you don’t have one of these:

You’ll note that, unlike regular mobile phones, the number keys don’t have a set of letters on them on account of the phone having a qwerty keyboard.  The same applies to the Cackberry and every other mobile phone with a qwerty keyboard.  I once pointed this out to someone at Orange customer services who said I was the second person that day to say it.  It was a while ago now and it still asks.

And while I’m complaining, Sky still have their old phone number that changed months ago on the phone number list on the Interactive service.  The “new” number is free for Sky Talk customers to clal but the old one isn’t.