Orange Insanity

Orange used to be a great mobile phone company. I think they are still the best in the UK, but their standards have dropped substantially since they were taken over by France Telecom. Here’s an example.

On their website they advertise a talk plan that gives you 120 minutes of cross-network talk time and 30 free text messages all for £15/month. This sounded like a good deal, so I called their customer services to change to this plan.

Ah, but they claim that this plan is only for new subscribers. I suspected this might be the case so I had a plan ready. I pointed out that I could port my number out to a Vodaphone pay-as-you-go plan and then come back to Orange as a new customer a week later. And that would achieve nothing but wasting everyone’s time. They said that if I spoke to the disconnections dpeartment and told them about my plan they might be able to short circuit the operation somewhat.

So I told the disconnection people about my plan. And they agreed that it was silly and that they could put me straight onto the new plan.

But I would have to upgrade my phone.

That threw me for a second. I like my current phone and Orange don’t have any newer phones that I like more. Then I remembered that Orange always have a couple of crappy phones that they give as free upgrades. So I asked for one of those.

So here’s how will works. At my next billing date (tomorrow) I get on my new talk plan. On Friday I’ll get my new (crap) phone with a new SIM. I need to register my new SIM and throw the old one away. I can then use my new SIM in my old phone and everyone is happy.

But I don’t know why they can’t just make it simpler.