I live in a small town in Herefordshire, served mainly by 2 Orange phone masts. For the past couple of months the signal has been absolutely abysmal, for much of the time there is no signal at all. Orange customer services give me the usual ‘platitudes’ and vague promises of ‘will be fixed soon’ but nothing happens. Is there a major problem with Orange nationally? How long does it take to fix a mast? What a pile of cr@p Orange is! Can’t change provider at the moment otherwise I would 👿

I’ve been an orange customer for a few years now, and this last 6 months or so has been a farce for one reason or another. But the signal dropping,call dropping and various other connection problems I’ve had recently are getting tiring, and thats at various spots around the country. Are the other networks any better?

Seems that problems are occurring all over Herefordshire. What is up with Orange??!!

Same problems here in Co Durham. My signal fluctuates at home from full to nothing constantly. It’s not the phone as I’ve tried a different one and it was equally poor.

I’m moving back to Vodafone as the Orange signal locally is so inconsistent.

Same here near Preston. I can see a big orange mast, but no longer get a ‘full’ signal all the time. Something to do with Tmobile merger I guess.?

orange was always good her in nottingham but has been on and off fluctuating recently – I put it down to my I phone

I might swap to O2 next contract, and ive been with orange for 15 years

naff in London too. Got a new phone on Orange back in December and getting frustrated at the signal going from 4 bars of 3GS signal to zip and back again in minutes. My presumption was that it is a capacity issue.
Friends on vodaphone do better, but still have trouble at times.

Recession and cost cutting, innit?

set up your phone for free roaming onto o2 problem solved

Latest I heard it was due to the merger with t mobile!! Btw have you had the update text that allows you to now use both sets of equipment?? Jesus phone shows when it’s flicking between the two!

I have a work phone on Orange and it’s shocking! Got drastically worse with the T-Mobile merger deal, I cancelled the update and it got better. When you add two piles of shit together you get a bigger pile of shit!

dump the t-mobile update and it may improve.

Both Orange and T-Mobile use ‘long range’ masts which were laid out to throw signals further and now due to 3G etc they simply don’t achieve the range anymore but haven’t invested in new masts to counter the problem

As above the merge is the problem, plus all the thousands of little scrotes who got smart phones for Christmas!!

I was going to say it might be since Orange took on the iPhone. AT&T customers in the States have been bitching for ages about their signal quality, and blamed the antenna on the 4 for a lot of it, but it seems that it’s smartphones in general that suck so much bandwidth that it’s compromising networks. O2 had a headstart, and seem to have grown their network along with smartphone usage, but even they put a cap on their data allowance. Trouble is, nobody wants a cell mast close to their home, but everyone wants a better signal…

What I really hate about switching to Orange is that Visual Voicemail (which I loved on o2 / iphone 3gs) is not available on iPhone4! What rubbish….

Set your phone to roam between orange and T mobile, it costs you no more and has solved reception issues at work where I couldn’t get a signal inside the building

At one time only place I could get a signal from Orange was up the back of my garden next to the metal shed. Last few months its got considerably better and the advice from rocketdog sounds like its worth a go

Admittedly I only use it to make or receive the odd call none of this internet business, can’t read writing that small

I have found recently that txts and voice mail alerts only come through if I send a txt or sometimes not for days.
I’ve been on to the iPhone team at orange and the gave me a few things to try to “improve the handset performance”, but I think it’s much more likely to be an orange issue, but how can I prove it???

Seems the problem is everywhere! So why do I keep getting e-mails from Orange telling me ‘engineers are working on it’ btw I have enabled the phone to pick up T-mobile as well as Orange, but still the signal fluctuates between full and f+++ all ………….

Had a text of Orange the other day saying that I may see the my network is dispayed as T-Mobile.

How very mysterious.

I moved to a smart phone about two months ago, and it was a remark from a friend of mine who’s just moved to orange on his work phone that made me consider that there may be better options for data service.

I bought a £10 O2 sim and did some back-to-back comparisons. There was simply no contest. I’m running my credit down on Orange right now and migrating my number across next week.

Even the phone seems to work better with the O2 sim in it, irrespective of the actual network provision.

Both Orange and T-Mobile use ‘long range’ masts which were laid out to throw signals further and now due to 3G etc they simply don’t achieve the range anymore but haven’t invested in new masts to counter the problem

No they didn’t.

looks like its time to move providers