Orange and data costs, not bad, not bad
I was having a look at Orange’s data price plans today. A friend of mine has just got herself a Nokia N95. More on that later.
She’s on Orange though. So I had a look to see what sort of damage it would be, from a data perspective.
So it’s not shocking.
Not too shocking.
First off, you can pay £4 and get four meg’s worth of inclusive data. Granted that you’ll blow this in a few minutes if you’re using an N95 anywhere near how it is intended, but after that, it’s only a quid a meg.
I say ‘only’ because Vodafone is currently double that.
At £40 a month, Orange will offer you 80mb inclusive. Bit shit that. But the per meg fee drops to £0.65/meg.
Stump up £88 and you can have unlimited data.
That’s a bit shite.
Hmm.
Well, it’s not as bad as Vodafone or o2. So that is to be encouraged.
It’s a bit of a shame taking delivery of an N95 and then not having the data plans available at reasonable cost to really make use of it.
Having just spent a weeks holiday in the UK I can say that the UK is (as with many other things except Baked Beans and Energy Efficient Lightbulbs) more expensive than most parts of Europe for data. I was looking for a PAYG contract with which I could sensibly use the ‘net but it was impossible.
Three.uk offer a 2MB for 50p (in one hour) or 4MB for 1 pound (in 24 hours) contract but its all within their garden wall. Which wasnt too bad becuase most sites are available via their proxy. Howver google mail wasnt working at all which was my main target. It also wouldn’t work via the Opera browser. I think they only support the built-in browser ID’s.
T-Mobile have a similar offer. It was WebNWalk so its probably a liitle more open than Three.
The rest of the offers were just way way too expensive.
I’ve been testing WebNWalk in Germany and its not bad at all. Pricing seems good too at 50 Euro for unlimited (5GB) per month. Considering they have a very nice HSDPA network and include a few hours hotspot usage too its about the best there is in DE right now.
Keep up the great work with the UK data news. I’m following it every day!
Steve
Posted by Steve Paine on April 7th, 2007 at 11:21 pm.Steve
You know Orange has an unlimited photo data plan, ie unlimited photo uploads and photo browsing from the n95, which is pretty good, and the n95 takes pretty good pictures.
Tom
Posted by tom on May 6th, 2007 at 6:51 pm.