Orange declares mobile broadband price war

Orange has set the cat among the dongles with the UK’s lowest mobile broadband pay-monthly tariff. For £4.89 ($8.29/€5.75), Orange’s Internet Everywhere serve provides the firm’s existing pay monthly, pay-as-you-go and home broadband customers with a 500Mb per month download cap and connection speeds of up to 3.6Mb/s. …

[Darren 4]

WTF??

Sorry, I'd eat 500MB in one day, might be cheap, but for hardcore surfers it's not a good package

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if ...

... only Orange could talk to people like Apple and Palm and ... about MID and superphone deals?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a shame their 3G network is so sh*t.

Otherwise this would be good news.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Finally!

I left Orange for T-Mobile in 2006 telling them that paying £4 / MB was a tad excessive when I could pay £5.63 (including 25% discount) for "unlimited". Nice to see they've caught up.

[OFI]

Contract periods

"Subscribers to the contract – which carries an 18 month term"

18 months contract on something ever changing like mobile broadband. I don't think so..

What happened to 12 month contracts being the norm, people seem to have accepted far too many of these 18 month contracts with telephone companies.

[Neil Hoskins]

Or...

...you could just tether your mobile phone to your laptop and keep your existing data rate. What's that? Your iPhone/gPhone/LatestPOSFromAmerica doesn't let you do that? Oh dear.

[JetSetJim]

It's only cheap because the cap is small...

Three do a 1GB cap for a tenner, or a whopping 15GB cap for £15.

Assuming you're in coverage, anyways :-)

[handle]

Not news

Three offered its existing customers 1GB (i.e. twice what Orange is offering) for £5 (before VAT reduction) a month, 18-month contract and free dongle, MORE THAN A YEAR AGO. Please don't just regurgitate press releases without doing some research. (I have no affiliation with any provider, by the way.)

[Bod]

"connection speeds of up to 3.6Mb/s"

At least it's qualified as connection speed as otherwise I'd rant on about how it's almost impossible to get anywhere near the quoted speeds on 3G, especially if you're moving more than 0.1mph.

So, when are Orange going to cut their US roaming data rates though? Come on. £8 per MB !!

[James 12]

And so it starts

I like WAR, especially when its a PRICE WAR...

Now if only VODA would take the bate we could start to see popper mobile internet at a reasonable price..

Shame about the TILL THE END OF TIME contract lengths...

Paris - cus she's never going cheap..

[Roger Stenning]

Whoopee-do, orange

So, they've declared war? What with, a glove puppet? what the hell is so good about this "offer" - it's practically a match for Vodafone's current 3G access/bandwidth offers - and it still doesn't even come close to Virgin's exceptional offers either.

Colour me singularly unimpressed.

[John Browne]

eltit

It all seems rather expensive.

The Irish versions of the UK operators have been offering cheaper mobile broadband services for a long time now.

Vodafone €19.99 for 5GB/month (12month contract)

O2 €19.99 for 10GB/month (18 month Contract)

3, €19.99 for 15GB/month (12month contract)

Pay as you go options available too.

It's mobile broadband so it's inherently a bit shit anyway.

[zxcvbnm]

Barely cheaper

Can't help think that Vodaphones £15 for 1gb which never expires would work out cheaper for most light users that paying a fiver every month.

[Anonymous Coward]

Very nice

Well done, Orange.

Oh, and well done for avoiding the word/phrase/construct "unlimited*".

[Anonymous Coward]

here we go...

No Linux, and it goes for the NB300, the lowest rating of the new series. It could go for the NB200, run Ubuntu and lower the cost further still and sell even more units.

The companies have to push Linux; it is not worth the effort of making a Linux machine and then putting it on the shelf, finally removing them because nobody bought any - they have to push them ... no one is going to buy something tha they don't know is there.

Gaaahhhh!!!!!

[Patrick 14]

O2

I sometimes use a iphone 3g o2 sim in a 02 payg dongle and i get internet for free.

Also as I only have adsl i can sometimes get the internet faster than my 2mb ( upto 8mb aol) home phone line does lol. on the Dongle

But then again its very rare i can get a Decent mobile signal in my home for just voice let alone data and thats been like it on 3, t-mobile and o2 so thanks.

I must have a lead lined bungalow arghhh

Looking for enough money to move to a Country thats got a decent internet speed LOL

[Dennis O'Neill]

Eh?

"Rival network operator O2 already sends its customers an SMS when they’re getting close to their download limits."

Not to me, they didn't. Ok, I didn't go very far over my limit, but warning SMS? Not a sausage.

[calagan]

Will it ever replace ADSL/cable?

Is there any place in the World where 3G/HSDPA access is available without monthly bandwidth limit?

The speed would be sufficient to make it a replacement for ADSL or cable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bollocks to Orange price cap and warning messages

Last month data charges on top of allowance came in at nearly a ton.. no warning, no price cap..

When did this supposedly come in?

[dreadful scathe]

pondering

um...colour me slightly confused by "provides customers with unlimited mobile broadband usage ... in addition to a 1GB, 3GB or 10GB monthly download cap.".

hmm...unlimited usage with a cap. Clearly either "unlimited" or "cap" are defined slightly differently than normal- so, being an optimist, I'm assuming that you get a baseball cap with a choice of logo - mines the one with the "10gb" on it :)

[Jerome 0]

Pay-as-you-go?

Why "existing customers" if pay-as-you-go counts? Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you just get a free SIM, stick a bit of credit on it and never use it again?

@ Darren 4 - I'd like to see you eat 500MB in a year with the crappy speeds and connectivity I seem to get on mobile broadband.

@ zxcvbnm - yes, the Vodaphone deal is definitely the cheapest option for most users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Absurd prices

If their existing pricing structure wasn't so retarded, they wouldn't need this crap. Just charge a £5-£10/mo "usage fee", then £0.10/GB for any and all data. problem solved. Punitive rates for going above your cap are stupid. Caps are stupid. Regardless of what ISPs keep saying, Internet is like electricity: You should pay for what you use, and at a fixed rate none-the-less.

[Dave Bell]

It's a start

I had the phone line down, last weekend. A cable fault. Luckily the BT Outreach engineer could get to it. Just stuck a spare PAYG SIM (I'd picked it up free from Tesco) in an old mobile, and did a top-up at the village shop. We were covered.

If BT had been forced to replace underground cable, I would have been looking for a cheap mobile broadband. I'm not sure any of these deals really suit that sort of occasional use. Vodafone? It's starting to look tempting as a backup.

Anyone tried using it with Linux? Some of these beasts have a Windows-only set-up program, but then will run on a Linux box.

[frank ly]

True meaning of 'unlimited usage'...?

"Each provides customers with unlimited mobile broadband usage between midnight and 9am, in addition to a 1GB, 3GB or 10GB monthly download cap."

What does that actually mean? Does it mean that I could download as much as possible between midnight and 9am and that data will not count towards my monthly cap? That is what it sounds like but experience shows that 'unlimited usage' has a strange meaning where ISPs use it in their advertising. Can anyone tell us what it really means?

[Jerome 0]

@ VoodooTrucker

Screw the "usage fee", £0.10/GB sounds just fine to me. That way, the bastards have an incentive to make their network actually let me connect now and again - cos otherwise they won't get a sodding penny out of me.

[Greg Moseley]

Dongle...

Glad to see they are giving out the Huawei E160e dongle. I have unlimited for £7.50 a month (business) and was given the ZTE MF636 dongle. After 6 weeks of losing a connection to the network somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes all the time they have finally accepted there is a known fault with the modem driver (I'm not alone apparently). Will the replace the dongle for a different model, will they f*ck. They would rather keep crediting me for all the hassle until they get a driver fix.

Knowing how slow Orange can be in getting fixes out it could end up costing them more in credits.

[Anonymous Coward]

@calagan

Yes. I am using a PAYG SIM in a Nokia E51 with Joikospot to enable it as a wireless access point. 1 Windows & 1 Mac laptop connected simultaneously for most of the day. Totally useable - I am administering 12 websites while gf is surfing in general, including video.

SIM was free. Apparently calling is not especially cheap, but I don't make calls on this phone. Internet costs €1 per day if used (every day in my case). Usage is unlimited, "but it's not intended for downloading movies all day." When I do have a huge download I try to use the free wifi which is available in 99% (my rough estimate) of cafes and bars here.

Country: Estonia

Provider: Tele2

[Tim Hale 1]

unlimited mobile unlimited broadband usage between midnight and 9am

I agree with @frank ly; what does 'unlimited' mean? The ISPs have bastardised the language to the point where we don't know what they're saying anymore! Safest to assume that in this context it means a bonus 1GB or something, since no-one could 'reasonably' expect to be allowed to download more than that in a 9 hour timeframe. Thanks* ASA, you're great+.

*'Thanks' in this context should be interpreted as a fervent wish that the ASA sod off and die.

+'Great' should be interpreted as 'useless cretins, divorced from reality and on the payrole of the ISPs'.

[Tim Williams 2]

Cheapest by 11p

I'm getting 3GB for £5 a month from T-Mobile as an addon to my pay monthly phone plan and have had this a few months now. I suppose £4.89 is technically cheaper in monetary terms, but it's a lot more expensive per MB.

I wonder if Orange will now extend these prices to their French network where prices for 3G are still criminally expensive. Many of the tariffs are still time based and an unlimited package (with 3-5GB per month fair usage), will set you back about 40E a month. PAYG works out at about 8-10E a day. Ouch....

[mfraz]

@Greg Moseley

It looks like they're using the iCON 225 dongle and not a Huawei E160e as the quickstart guide links to http://shop.orange.co.uk/pdf/mobile_broadband/OptionIcon225-QuickStartGuide.pdf.

Looks like it should work with Ubuntu 9.04 providing the username and password fields are filled with something.

Not sure I like the idea of another 18 month contract though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Works Fine On Linux

I've just got one of these for occasional use and it's working fine on both my MacBook and my Acer Aspire One running Linpus Linux. In fact the software supplied by Orange for the MacBook is the OSX version of Mobile Partner a version of which is available for Linpus Linux via a Live update on the Aspire One.

I may have to try getting a PAYG Orange sim, registering it and then dropping it in the dongle and trying out the 'daily capped usage' option when I need more data! :o)

With regards to the comments about Orange crap coverage, coverage is great where I need it, that's just mobile broadband for you.

I actually resisted getting an Orange dongle for ages as they don't offer PAYG and my usage is sporadic. I have both a Three and an O2 dongle. The Three dongle is good if there is a strong signal but only a couple of bars then it's flaky! I've never managed to get anything better than EDGE on O2. In contrast Orange has coverage everywhere I need it. I did consider both T-Mobile and Vodafone but again, no decent coverage where I want it , which is a shame as the Voda £15\GB which never expires on PAYG would be perfect for my needs.