Orange and T-Mobile seamless 2G roaming begins October 12th
Orange and T-Mobile become one
Around this time in 2010, Orange and T-Mobile gave its subscribers the ability to use both networks, as part of the merger of the two businesses to form Everything Everywhere.
The rather crude merge worked by simply allowing users to roam on to the other network, a process that worked to a degree but didn't offer seamless transitions from one network to the other.
Not only that, it worked only for 2G (GSM). Fine for voice and text messaging, but pretty useless for data. Once roaming, you dropped back to the incredibly slow speeds offered by GPRS, or possibly EDGE if you were very lucky.
One year on, Everything Everywhere is ready to properly merge its 2G networks into one, allowing the phone to switch cells as if it was a single network.
This still doesn't solve the issue of slow data but the company is working on adding 3G as part of its 'Big 3G switch-on' over the coming months. However, even before then it is still a huge improvement over the current service.
According to a user named 'plymouthbloke1974' on the Digital Spy forum, there are now dates available for when each part of the country will switch from the current roaming system to operating as a single network.
We can't confirm these dates as they were given with the obligatory 'subject to change' disclaimer;
- October 12th: Gloucester and Midlands area.
- Week commencing October 31st: London, Wiltshire and down to Brighton area, North Wales, North West England and Scottish Central Belt.
- Week commencing November 7th: Norfolk, North East England and Aberdeen area.
- Week commencing November 14th: Everywhere else.
Also this week, Virgin Media announced that its subscribers - which already use the T-Mobile network - can now opt-in to enable use of the Orange network in the UK.
Further information can be found on the Virgin Media site, which explains the opt-in process, or you can take the plunge right away by texting 'YES' to 789777.
