Full Orange/T-Mobile national roaming - more info please

NFH

I hope that the Orange Company Representative will reply to this and enlighten us all on the forthcoming next phase of roaming between Orange and T-Mobile.

Since 5th October 2010, there has been 2G national roaming between Orange and T-Mobile, but I understand that full 3G national roaming has been planned for months for the second week of April, which will allow mid-call handovers between the two networks, hence fewer dropped calls. I was also told this is expected to alleviate many of the data bandwidth issues on both networks. Some questions I have are:

• What date will this happen from?
• Do customers have to opt in initially as they did with 2G roaming on 5th October?
• Are the separate Orange and T-Mobile networks being combined into one network, with two brands operating on the same network (similar technically to how Virgin etc operates on T-Mobile's network)?
• Will the public IP address ranges for data connections be changing as a result of this?
• If both networks are experiencing data bandwidth issues now, how will combining the networks or allowing full 3G roaming alleviate these issues?

grumbler

simax wrote: »

It's been postponed ... scheduled now for "later this year".

..............

drbesty

The 3g roaming has been pushed back, no-one has any fixed dates as of yet, when it does happen customers won't have to opt in, eventually there will be one combined network, once everything is complete the data usage will be spread more evenly, so congestion should be less of an issue, Orange are also spending big £££ on network upgrades and extra capacity so this should help further