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Orange mobile broadband

Orange overview

  • Great range of pay monthly contracts, including 18 month or flexible 1 month options with a 14 day guarantee
  • Choose from 1GB download allowance to "unlimited" (with 20GB fair use limit)
  • New high-performance dongle gives better coverage, and comes with a free Micro SD card.
  • Orange offer a neat solution if you need to boost your data allowance occasionally - you can buy add-on data on a 30-day rolling contract basis.
  • Orange mobile broadband customers get 2 for 1 cinema tickets with the Orange Wednesdays offer

Best selling Orange mobile broadband deals

Orange Broadband Genie Road Test results

Orange Road test
Orange Huawei E160 dongle
Downloads
rating -2 stars2 stars
Uploads
rating -3 stars3 stars
Most stable
rating -4 stars4 stars
Coverage
rating -3 stars3 stars
Feelgood factor
rating -3 stars3 stars
Dongle software
rating -4 stars4 stars
Overall rating
rating -3 stars3 stars

May 2010

2010 Awards: Most Stable runner-up

Although displaying a few slight improvements from last year, this was another disappointing set of results from Orange. For starters, the Huawei E1752 is a horrible dongle - it feels and looks cheap, rattled around in the USB slot and on several occasions the SIM cover just fell off.

This is meant to be a piece of kit a consumer can pop in their pocket - it really isn't good enough, especially when compared to he sturdy E160 of last year. Perhaps it should've followed O2's lead and stuck with it.

As with the Road Trip 2009, both download and upload speeds were poor at around 0.5Mb and 0.3Mb respectively. Even on a moving train, this is pretty woeful for something advertised at 'up to' 7.2Mb as its download speed capacity. However, even these speeds will be OK for simply surfing web pages and it seemed to cope OK with streaming audio content too, although it struggled with YouTube.

Coverage was another problem. With the possible exception of O2, it had an awful lot of black spots throughout the trip - we couldn't even get a signal in Winchester Station, or Surbiton when we were just 15 minutes from Waterloo. We can only hope it benefits from whatever happens with the T-Mobile merger, and fast.

But when we could connect, much like during the 2009 Road Trip, it held its signal well. The E1752 defied the odds, retaining Orange's runner-up prize for Most Stable from last year. Download tests proved very slow, but it tended to hang in there - an important factor when you want to get a file, listen to a show or change pages. With better coverage, this could make it a dongle worth shouting about in future, even without faster speeds.

Overall analysis of the Mobile Broadband Genie Road Trip 2010

by Chris Marling May 2010

About Orange

With its youthful 'the future's bright' days well behind it, the new 'I am' Orange is coping with a bit of an identity crisis. Once the cool, trend setting mobile network, it is now trying to act like one of the big boys while struggling with some of the baggage of its former self (mainly a poor customer service and reliability record). It's 'Orange Wednesdays' two-for-one cinema ticket deal is a sure-fire winner with mobile broadband customers though, and it is keeping pace (as far as deals go) in the mobile broadband UK market.

Back in 1994 Orange became the new kid on the mobile network block (a title it has since passed to 3). The company was taken over by France Telecom in 2001, along with the internet branch of the company originally known as Wanadoo (under which name it took over Freeserve): it became part of the Orange brand in 2006. As for mobile internet, while Orange has introduced a one-month rolling contract, there is not a specific pay as you go mobile broadband deal available. It started selling subsidised 'free' laptop deals with its mobile internet service in December 2008.

Orange has strong ties with Apple abroad, and rumours abound of UK deals in the pipeline to sell the iPhone here, as well as MacBook laptops as part of its range of so-called 'free laptop' deals with mobile broadband dongles. If true, this is sure to strengthen its position as it looks to join one of the 3G network sharing deals set up by its rivals (Vodafone/Os and 3/T-Mobile). Otherwise, its mobile broadband service could come in for more criticism in the long term.

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Orange customer reviews

Show all 73 Orange Mobile Broadband reviews»

  • unhappy

    by Pritesh Chandarana at 10:06 on 1 Sep 2010Report abuse

    Literally the worst all round service I have ever had. Months on end of disgracefully slow service and each time I call orange for help they simply blame downgraded masts, fob you off until next and just so unhelpful.

    Internet barely works most the time, often just cuts out randomly and is soooo slow. I'm in the Stratford, London area.
  • unhappy

    by impa1er at 23:22 on 9 Aug 2010Report abuse

    I've been using Orange mobile broadband for over a year now and have been relatively happy with the service while I was living in South Yorkshire. Now, after moving to North London, I am about to demand they terminate my contract. Although in the past months the connection speeds have been spotty - sometimes great, sometimes terrible, my connection speeds in the last few weeks have been unbearably slow. The Orange consultant I spoke with on the phone said that most of the masts in North London suffer a seriously degraded signal and there is no ETA when they will get it sorted. I don't know if other operators are any better but if this keeps up for another week, I am cancelling my contract prematurely and moving to one of the other players. This isn't the kind of service I expect when I pay £30 per month. I agree with another reviewer that if you go over your limit, you will be paying extortionate fees. That goes for mobile phone usage too (20p per minute). Anyone have better mobile broadband experience with 3G, Vodafone or O2?
  • unhappy

    by Shallot at 14:27 on 23 Jul 2010Report abuse

    Yes, be very careful with the broadband mobile service, it is poor. The best bet at the moment is mobile wifi dongle from Three which is cheap to run (in my experience) and allows you access via multiple devices which is great
  • neutral

    by chris at 10:18 on 19 Jun 2010Report abuse

    I've had an orange mobile broadband dongle for approx 18 months and am leaving the service now. My review:
    The speed never exceeded 260Kb/s despite the messages about being connected to a 3.6Mb/s signal.
    At "peak time" it can literally crawl at 4 or 5Kb/s.
    Exceeding your limit is very very expensive. Be very careful not to go over as you can easily find yourself paying an extra £20 to £40 in costs.
    The consumer base for orange has clearly grown and with many people using the mobile broadband connection at once the service can at times be very poor. Very low download rates and constant disconnections.
    Please no more twits posting about how expensive the masts are, research the profits for the fiscal year and you may get a surprise...
    My conclusion:
    If you HAVE to use mobile broadband then check out your options with many of the competitors who I think offer a better service. Make sure they offer a cooling off period to test the signal strength for your route with the option to terminate the contract if you are not satisfied.
    IMO Orange needs to invest more in their technology to provide faster and more connections, as it stands the monthly basic rate is very overpriced.

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