As of 1st May Orange will be increasing the price of their text messages from between 5p and 10p up to 12p per message! Further more Just Talk Origional will be removed completley. This gave you 5p per text message with a £50 voucher, plus cheaper calls than their new plans. For more info on how Orange ar ripping of their customers look here: Orange - New Rip Off Plans!

And their contract phones are going up tomorrow

Well thier prices for me are going up more than 50% here is some examples.

Just Talk Original with £50 voucher
5 min call: 25p 10min call: 50p

Fixed Rate Charges All Day
5 min call: £1 10min call: £2

Choose Your Own Off-Peak
5min call: 50p 10min call: £1

Talk and Save
5 min call: 85p 10min call: £1.10

Let alone text messages from 5p up to 12p!

Anyway I wrote to the Executive Office to complain. I wonder what they will say? Perhaps the new plans are great value for money? Will let you all know anyway.

yeah - note that for "putting up the cost" read "Orange will be refreshing its pay as you go plans" they must think their customers are stupid.

Expect the cost of handsets to go up to

Thats right the handset prices have gone up to. They don't want to subsidise them any more. All networks are expected to do the same by the end of the year. This will mostly affect Contract customers who recieve the biggest subsidy. Pay as You Go subsidies are getting rare now. But if you handset is locked which it shouldn't be and your phone hasn't been subsidised, they must unlock it for free. If they don't tell Oftel. Its illegal!

The 3G debt burden has its price and looks like we will all be paying for it whether we have a 3G handset or not!

I've got an Orange Nokia 5110 which I bought 3 or 4 years ago with 'Just Talk', only for emergencies. By emergencies, I mean that I've still got about £40 of the original £50 credit left. (25p/5p). Yeah, I know!!!

This thread's just got me thinking though. Will I stay on this original tariff until I've used all of my credit (estimated to be about 2017), or will I have been automatically switched over at some point to an 'equivalent' tariff.

I know I could phone customer services, but don't know if they might switch me over against my will if I phone 'em and bring it to their attention.

Thanks for any help/advice.

I'm glad this thread has been posted

Basically Orange are pulling a fast one - removing the £50 voucher reductions but giving you 10% more talk time.

No good for me, I am a text maniac, it's going to cost me 12p now instead of 5p!!!

I'm someone who lives in an area with poor Orange coverage, therefore I have a triple sim-card cover for Orange/O2/Vodafone, usually keeping it on O2 at home but switching it to Orange where possible out and about.

As someone who was on the Orange Just Talk Original £50 voucher plan with discounted calls & text messages for over the last 2 1/2 years, as soon as this is gone, it's bye bye from me! Orange have been promising to improve their coverage around here "sometime this year" but haven't yet carried it out. With those charges I'd be better off sticking to O2 most of the time with their PAYG Original tarrif with calls at 2p at the weekend, and Vodafone for Voda-Voda calls. And as I hardly know anyone else with an Orange mobile phone except some ex classmates from university, it's really not going to be much use.

Sorry Orange, but while I've had coming up to three years of great service from yourself (apart from coverage at home!), once you scrap the £50 discount scheme on Just Talk you'll have lost a customer... and their might be more that follow

I've just had a text message from Orange advising that from
01 05 03 I will be charged for 0800 & 0808 numbers at standard rates. Anyone else get charged for what should be freephone numbers? I've been on Orange's Virgin EQ tarif for just over 12 months now. Is it time to move on from Orange?

I am not happy with what T-Mobile have just done to there price plans. They have got rid of all the Anytime price plans. Which is good for land line and same network call users. They have gone mad on "Any network". Do they not realise not everybody phones other networks? In the responce i got from them they said, "We appreciate some people don't make calls to other mobile networks and understand that some of our plans will not suit everyone."

But they had plans that suited most people, now they have just restricted who the plans will appeal to even more! I think they must have a monkey in charge now, bring back One2One!

Don't virgin charge for 0800 and 0808 numbers except registered charities?

Complain to orange - thats what we've all got to do.

Remember when they tried to put the 5 free messages included with orange out here down to 3? So many people complained that they changed their minds and put it back up to 5 again.

power to the people!

i suggest everyone switch over to 02. im not sure of what they offer now but its worth checking out their website because they always have great offers on. i started off with an orange payg phone and im so glad i switched over to 02.

"i suggest everyone switch over to 02. im not sure of what they offer now but its worth checking out their website because they always have great offers on. i started off with an orange payg phone and im so glad i switched over to 02."

trouble is tho a lot of people are tied into a certain network because all of their colleagues / family / friends use the same network.
Going with o2 for me would cost me even more because I would be always phoning people on a different network.

I don't see why mobile companies can't let people keep the talk plans they are on and are happy with. Why piss off your customers? They will just go to another network!

I lost it with orange when they started charging for data calls that should be included in my inclusive minutes on my contract.

What I can't understand is :

My Nokia 7650 has an integrated analogue modem, I dialed to my own landline to communicate with my PC at home. I was charged for these calls. Shorely If they worked out that they were data then they have been listening to my calls...

Orange customer services said that the number wasn't an Internet provider and I shouldn't have been charged but I yet await a refund...

ITS A BIG REFRESHING:

[COLOR=orange][SIZE=40]ORANGE RIP-OFF![/SIZE] [/COLOR]

Up yours Orange you stingy bastards. We seem to be bailing out your French owners once again.

Well I got a reply from Orange Executive Offfice which basically said their new talk plans offer "Value for money." Also Just Talk Original will no longer be available as of 1st May. I sent a complaint to Oftel for what its worth. I reckon they will say that there is a "Competetive market" and they won't do a thing about it

[COLOR=green][SIZE=40]GREEN RIP-OFF![/SIZE] [/COLOR]

Don't worry the money that their making from pay as you go customer is nothing to what Orange have done to there employees over the last year.

Trust me, if people call up complaining about pre-pay increases or handset subsidy reductions it will fall on deaf ears.

We have had all means of retaining customers taken away from us, all France Telecom care about is one time profit increases (After all you may get 5% of customers complaining, but only 0.5% will actually leave).

I only use my phone for txting.

So now, basically, it's going to cost me 12p per txt rather than 5p?!

I was thinking of moving to Orange PAYG as I liked the free texts per day extra pack you could get and they had the phone I wanted...

But now I think I'll just buy the phone from the manufacturer/eBay and stick my Virgin SIM card in... what an apalling price rise!

Look at this totally crap reply i received from Orange:


This has made me even more determined to stick their sim card down the toilet. *****.

This is what i am sick of now with T-Mobile and Orange. Before they use to be well ahead of Cellnet and Voda, there call charges were well below Voda's and Cellnets. Now they both seem to be sitting back and instead of being "ahead" of the competiton they are bring it inline. How can 12p a text be "competitive" as they put it when text messages are cheaper on other networks. (don't voda still rip some people off with 12p a message? )