Everything Everywhere "Goes Live" 5th October

Exhortation

But only for 2G and you have to "sign-up".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11199786

Oscar_The_Grouch

This looks good for Orange, T-Mobile and Three customers in the long term, with the sharing of the networks. My only concern is what will happen to the customer service? T-Mobile are thought to be one of the better firms when it comes to tariff costs and customer service. Orange, however, are well and truly useless.

maxtweenie

Oscar_The_Grouch wrote: »

This looks good for Orange, T-Mobile and Three customers in the long term, with the sharing of the networks. My only concern is what will happen to the customer service? T-Mobile are thought to be one of the better firms when it comes to tariff costs and customer service. Orange, however, are well and truly useless.

They're not merging anything. The only thing they are doing is allowing calls on 2g to roam between the two carriers so customers should in theory always the strongest available signal. It's opt in from 5th October whilst they sort out the inevitable problems with various handsets, and should then become automatic early next year.

As far as I'm aware, they have no plans to merge. They've said all along that the two separate networks will continue.

phil001

from the link

...
It said it also plans to roll it out to 3G services.
When it does, Orange customers will be able to use a 3G network owned and operated by Mobile Broadband Network Limited (MBNL), a joint venture company owned by Three and T-Mobile.
Orange joined MBNL on the 16 August.
"Everything Everywhere will be adding Orange sites to the network it shares with Three in the course of time, and Three customers will get access to a significant proportion of those as they are added," said a spokesperson for Everything Everywhere.
Three customers are already able to use the Orange network for 2G calls and texts.
...

Didn't know that Three and t-mobile share 3G signal, so does that mean that if i had a phone on both networks they would have the same signal stength on 3G?
Seems that soon, Three, Orange and Tmobile will all be using the same network, wierd

lozzaman

Some sites are shared between 3 and T-Mobile under the MBNL agreement (backhaul, mast) but in other locations they still exist distinctively. I still see a couple of places where 3G signal exists on 3 but not T-Mobile.
This move will definitely leave o2 and Vodafone well behind in 3G coverage. In my opinion they already are, especially o2.