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3 End Roaming Agreement With O2 - It Will Be Orange From Late 2006
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3 will terminate their National Roaming agreement with O2 and will move over to Orange later this year. Change over should be completed by early 2007.
3 selects Orange as new national roaming partner
3 selects Orange as new national roaming partner
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Reception should be similar but you will find slight differences in coverage.
http://coverage.orange.co.uk/business/corporate/uk/UKCoverageSearch.htm
http://www.webmap.o2.co.uk/
I have now had 3, Vodafone and 02 3G services and in my area the latter 2 have far greater call stability and that is what counts for me. I shall be trying T-Mobile when my Vodafone contract expires as their flext tariffs are unbeatable plus you can surf the Internet up to 2GB a month for about £8 with Web'N'Walk Pro.
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Anyhoo, I see that the terms (ie CASH) of the agreement were not disclosed, anyone got any ideas?
I would not read too much into this deal as it was put out to tender many months ago and is a vital requirement tp make the network viable. There is a lot happening now with telecoms consolodation and with little prospect of a floatation and nothing unique on offer Hutchison will have a major headache providing the kind of money that 3 UK needs to stay afloat and may be tempted to cut and run if a reasonable offer appears from a company who would like to add a mobile network to their existing telecoms business. By the end of 2007 the mobile telecoms landscape will have changed considerably.
Calls will still drop when you switch down or up to 3g, just like they did with O2. This is because of the network chagning (O2 3g to O2 GSM & Orange 3g to Orange GSM calls switch seamlessly because there is no network change involved).
3 will have probably just gone for the most cost effective option, after all they aren't doing too well at the moment, aren't doing too well in terms of subscriber numbers and have huge losses.
In any case though, this is good news - O2 seem to be struggling more and more by the week with handed over Three traffic here, so Orange are bound to do better :cool: and of course call quality post handover (direction: Three > roamer) won't fall over quite as bad as it currently does either
Not in rural NE Scotland - their coverage is awful outside the larger towns.
Well said, I agree 100%
Was in Newcastle last few days, cant fault the service. When Orange come aboard, things should get even better.
Sod all the three bashers:D
The 'seamless' issue is one of definition. Roaming between 3 and 02 has always been seamless in the respect that the handset changes network automatically when the 3 signal becomes unuseable. The user does not have to make any manual changes. The same will be true with Orange roaming I suspect. The big question is what will happen when this process takes place during a voice call. The handset has to log off one network and register on a separate one and there is a validation process during roaming to setup the connection. All of this may well be seamless but will someone using a 3 phone be able to remain connected during this process? The vast majority of the time most of the handovers are not noticable when the handset is being used for data or is in standby mode, its when a circuit switched voice call is in progress that the roaming process causes call dropping and I don't think 3's move to orange will change this as it is a technical issue that is unique to 3 (only having one type of network) and there does not appear to be any published solution that addresses the issue of GSM/UMTS handovers whilst roaming.
If anyone can come up with some technical information on how two separate networks can maintain calls whilst the roaming registration and validation takes place please post the details here.