Orange

Posted on 15 Jul 2008 at 14:18

Modem tested:

Option Icon 225

Maximum speed achieved:

1.3Mb/sec

Average speed achieved in London:

650Kb/sec

Average speed achieved out of London:

320Kb/sec

Orange may pitch its mobile broadband as a business service but it certainly takes a while to get to the job at hand. The fussy five-minute installation procedure is by far the most sluggish here, and the PC has to be rebooted before connecting, although Orange says it's rolling out new software.

Installation is thankfully, of course, a one-off procedure, and matters of speed improve once you're up and running. Its download speeds may fail to match the standard set by Vodafone, 3 or T-Mobile, but are respectable nonetheless: around 1Mb/sec with a decent 3G signal in central London is quite acceptable, although it does slope off to the low-hundreds of kilobytes per second when not in the capital. Nevertheless, that's fast enough for the basic web browsing and email access that business customers will be seeking. However, Orange's £5.50 per MB fee for data used outside of the EU is nothing short of ludicrous for a business service, where you would expect customers to be travelling regularly.

The Orange Business Everywhere software is relatively straightforward, although the network turns on a highly erratic content-filtering service by default, which takes exception to seemingly innocent sites while giving a green light to others that are blatantly pornographic. Our advice to any potential Orange customers would be to call customer services to have this worthless irritation turned off.

Rating: 3/6

Author: Barry Collins