Orange dishes out 8 meg broadband to businesses

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 30 Sep 2008 at 08:26

Orange is to begin offering "free" 8Mb/sec broadband to business and home customers who sign up for an 18-month mobile phone contract.

The network has been offering 2Mb/sec connections to pay monthly mobile customers for some time. However, the new deal sees the speed boosted to 8Mb/sec, with small business customers included in the offer for the first time.

The "free" Broadband for Business package has no data cap (subject to the obligatory fair usage policy which threatens to cut download speeds for "very high usage") and comes with "business-grade customer support" according to Orange.

The home tariffs are split into three tiers: Starter, Select and Max. Starter is free with the pay monthly mobile contracts, but includes a data cap of 10GB per month. Select removes the data cap for an additional fee of £10 per month, whilst Max throws in free evening and weekend landline calls for £15 per month.

Both the business and home deals are only available to new customers.

Orange claims it's made huge improvements to its broadband service. "We have spent the past 12 months working hard on fixing the basics," claims Mike Newnham, consumer vice president at Orange.

"As a result we've seen huge improvements in the quality of our broadband network and the service we offer, and our customers are already providing us with some extremely positive feedback."

Orange didn't fare well in PC Pro's 2008 broadband awards, however, scoring only two stars out of six in our reader-voted Service and Reliability survey.

Click here to see the full results from this year's Best Broadband Award.