The Wikipedia Page for Hutchinson 3G suggests that since 2008 T Mobile and Three combined their 3G signals.

Is this true? As where I live we get a strong Three 3G signal, but there's no 3G on T Mobile. Although the base stations are on seperate sites - in two nearby villages both companies masts are on the same Macrocell.

Also having a conversation this morning to Three, the operator suggested that they no longer have a deal with Orange for GSM roaming, again is that true? There still seems to be some clunky signal reconnects/drop outs in area where this happened.

It's due for completion at the end of this year. It's not fully complete yet, a few months left.

The Orange thing is wrong as far as I know, I think you / she is confused. What she / you mean is calls aren't dropped when switching hopefully any more (depending on your handset), it still relies on Orange, it just should be able to switch mid-call, if it doesn't then it will when the Orange / T-mobile / 3 network cell merge happens.

Thanks, I queried with the operator about roaming onto the Orange network, and his reply was that they no longer do that (I didn't mention dropping calls) and insited they no longer rely on them.

So does it mean, then 3G drops out, and the handset goes to GSM its gone onto Orange, or just when it comes up E?

Whever happens I'm having huge problem at the moment with them, full strength signal at home, yet phone calls are dropped or sound garbled. I've checked another handset and its doing the same on there.

So for GPRS and Edge - E, that's Orange, when you are on 3G or H for HSPDA you are on the 3 network. Voice calls can be carried out on either.

You should only fall back to Orange when you have no 3 coverage (or almost no coverage). Sometimes it drops calls, that can also depend on your handset I'm told.

If you have an official 3 phone sadly you can't manually force it to 2G only. I'd say sit tight because next year Orange / T / 3 will all be integrated as T / Orange will be joining MBUK and linking together.

Thanks - thats better than any info I've found to date. I've found when the phone shows G I can still use data, although rather slowly, or when on E it tells me to wait until I have a better signal. Although I thought E was better than G?


I'd love to, but at the moment its made the service unusable for voice calls, a mate of mine called a little while ago and I only caught about 30% of his conversation. Luckily he's the type of person who can talk for England and its mostly nonsence so you can just say "yea" to anything he says, but it was annoying earlier when trying to speak to my credit card company.

E is better than G!, both come from Orange, not sure why Edge isn't working well for you.

Its odd, if I'm connected via E and go into a browser I get a page from Three saying that I'm outside of their optimum coverage area and should try later.

Dont get that on G though.

very strange, maybe somebody else has some thoughts on that. I've not experienced it.

There's a post on the 3G Website forum about this now, it appears that where Three consider 3G coverage to be good enough the Orange roaming is coming to an end

Well it will be 98% 3G coverage by the end of the year, so only 1% lower than 2G coverage anyway. It doesn't surprise me, especially when they add the 3,000 Orange masts in too.

The only problem with that might be that 3G doesn't penetrate in to buildings as well as 2G because of the higher frequencies.

However it will probably help them come up with even better deals / prices.

Seems like it might also lead to a mass exodus, almost certainly a "get out of contract free" card (they were happily letting people out of contracts when the O2 to Orange switch happened).

Meh, maybe, not if they wait until the 3,000 Orange masts are added, people will hardly notice, 3G everywhere.

Which handsets don't drop when roaming over to Orange? My Nokia 5230, which is hardly an old or obscure handset, definitely still drops out with a "connection error" when 3G goes.