Review: Orange Mobile Broadband

Orange Broadband Review

In a nutshell: Orange Mobile Broadband costs the same as mobile broadband from 3-Mobile, T-Mobile and Vodafone, but it's the slowest service on offer, with peak speeds of 1.8 Mbps.
Best buy: Orange Mobile Broadband (£15 per month)

The Orange Mobile Broadband service is very simple. For £15 a month you get a free USB dongle, connection speeds of up to 1.8 Mbps and up to 3 Gbytes of data. You'll need to sign up to an 18 month contract. The system is compatible with Windows and Apple Mac operating systems.

Compared with other mobile broadband providers, the Orange service is the same as the others in terms of cost, but offers the slowest connection speed, with peak speeds of 1.8 Mbps. Currently 3-Mobile offers speeds of 2.8 Mbps, T-Mobile offers a choice of 1.8 Mbps or 3.6 Mbps, and Vodafone is the fastest with up to 7.2 Mbps in some parts of the country.

Orange Broadband Consumer Reviews

Love your mobile network? Hate it? Please share your experiences to help other people choose the mobile broadband network that's best for them. Please do not review this network if you have not used it. This is a review site, not a forum, so please don't just ask questions. Please do not use swear words or offensive language, and please, no advertising!

Average rating from 9 reviews:

Reviewed by Yogesh from Uk london on 4th Oct 2008
Well all i can say is !! think 1000 times before u switch to orange ... i rate it not even a half star. worse conntection. with worse coverage and slow speed. The conncetion get disconnected in a average of 1 hr a day . so when my download starts for movies or games . it gets disconnected and thats it start again . well and once i didnt get any broad band for nearly 1 month and yea its true and that was not enough even when i asked for whats going on in the orange customer service they say even they dont know the problem .. it was a big prob for 30 days no net?? thats a lame business. and customer support team is in India. how will they know whats going on in uk. and those ppl dont even bother analysing the prob as they switch every hour and dont even bother .i m currently paying 19 £ a month for this piece of junk .well as far as im concerned I m never gonna use any product of orange ... never in my life
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Reviewed by Steve from Birmingham, UK on 2nd Oct 2008
Signed up for Orange mobile BB when I renewed my phone contract with a view to cancelling my BT line at home. I really wish I hadnt bothered. Having been with Orange for 6 years I have never had any signal problem. Now, after receiving a message from Orange saying the service in my area had been improved my phone will only work in the kitchen, I can only connect to the mobile BB network by attaching the dongle to a 10 feet long USB extension and attaching that with a sucker to the kitchen window and suffer regular disconnections. I have installed a speed tester on the laptop and my average connection upload speed is 0.06 mb/s and download 0.15 mb/s - awful. I have had to buy a 3 mobile BB dongle on PAYG as a backup and have my BT line reconnected.
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Reviewed by Fez from Manchester on 21st Aug 2008
Constant disconnections. Poor signals even in areas they say are good signal areas. Disappointed as i used to think orange had the best coverage
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Reviewed by declan from england on 11th Aug 2008
well all i can say is i do like orange mobile broad band but thats because i checked my postcode in an orange store they have all issues and a coverage checker accurate to say 100metres so my opinion is that next time you think of buying go to orange them selves
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Reviewed by Dave from Glasgow on 31st Jul 2008
I asked Phones4u about coverage in certain areas of Glasgow and was told there was good coverage all over Glasgow. That isn't true. Spent a lot of time with Orange support, eventually got passed on to level 2 support who said I am on the fringe of one aerial and I had been missold the device. Orange techs say that there aren't enough aerials in the Glasgow area to provide a good service in some areas at the moment, they are planning more but not in the next six months. In the evenings the data rate can go down to around 1600 bits per second (old fashioned teleprinter speeds!). The max download I've managed in one month is about 330Mbytes a long way short of 3Gbytes. Why don't Orange have a mobile broadband checker on their website? I think contract sellers are basing their predictions on the 3G mobile phone coverage checker which doesn't mean you will get good data transfer. I'm now left chasing the seller with trading standards. It's time someone like ofcom came down heavy on these folk.
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Reviewed by Darran from Wales on 26th Jul 2008
I bought Orange Mobile Broadband from Carphonewarehouse, they did a check on my postcode (I live in Cardiff) & told me i was in a very good coverage area and would get up to 1.8 mbps. I dont get anywhere near that, around 100k if i'm lucky.
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Reviewed by myles from england on 22nd Jul 2008
Its worked perfectly for me over the past 3-4 years. Had no problems with it. GOOOOOD!
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Reviewed by scott from UK on 8th Jul 2008
I think orange mobile broadband is great, i work for carphonewarehouse, i have orange and also 3 mobile broadband, i live in sheffield city centre and find orange far quicker with better signal, as i write this im downloading vista service pack 1 and the orange mobile broadband networks logged onto 3g+ and im getting 180k a sec download speed which equates to almost 2meg speed which is great, at most on 3s network i might get 1/2 a meg speed !!
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Reviewed by MR Hassan from UK on 6th Jul 2008
according to what you are told when you enquire about the dongle and it's speed you are told it has speed of 1.8 Mps minimum, but when you start browsing, the speed is very, very slow that it switchs from HSPDA to UMTS and to GPRS which has data tranfer rate of 34 - 48 kbps very murch slower than even a dail up modem. Now why not tell the customers about the reallity in speed, rather than dicovering after signing up?
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