[3g-g]

:eek:


The Orange mobile phone network lost its data connectivity yesterday over most of the country.

Users started losing their GPRS connectivity from about 10am, and network services were only restored in the early hours today – though the cause and exact scale of the problem remains a mystery.

Anyone who has worked as a service engineer will know what happens: you muck about with the customer's kit and suddenly it starts working, you've no idea why but the customer doesn't know you don’t know. So, do you blag something convincing and get out while the going's good, or hang around and try to understand what you did to fix the problem?

Right now Orange is following the latter plan, and has promised to let us know what when wrong when they work it out. But if the fault remains elusive then we can expect to see a convincing blag in the next day or two anyway: after all, it's all up and working now.

Here's the Original. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/07/orange_gprs_down/)

[3GScottishUser]

Who cares at £1 a MB they can shove it and make a complete fool of themselves subsidising 3G handsets that have little prospect generating revenue with anything else!

I have actually worked out that it'd be more cost effective to get an additional T-Mobile contract with Web'N'Walk Pro for data rather than give the dafties at Orange £60 a month for 1GB!!

As things stand Orange appear to be where 3 were with their 'walled garden' thanks to the crazy pricing.... even Orange World is a 'no go' thanks to the per MB charging.

Utterly bonkers!! Whoever runs Orange UK should be shot for maintaining such silly unattractive pricing.

[Ben]

The PAYG prospect is shocking better if they're still operating at £1/day for unlimited. Doesn't make sense for contract users though at all, and to think that Orange were really the only network with reasonable data bundles a couple of years back!

They still trump Vodafone's data pricing for contract and PAYG customers, but at least Live! is free and most contracts come with a free extras pack (though at £2.35 a meg the extras packs don't go far).

[Hands0n]

Data, generally, is in complete chaos at the moment. Leaders like T-Mobile and [possibly] now 3 with x-series will no doubt "stimulate" the remainder into some kind of response. Clearly Voda and Orange have a long way to go ....... But then so does Data Tariffing in general - unless it really wants WiMax to wipe 3G Data off the face of the planet!