Orange Broadband

This review was updated in July 2011 to reflect the findings of our latest survey.

Orange has installed its own ADSL equipment into BT exchanges, which helps keep its prices down but limits availability. Check the website to see if you’re covered. Orange mobile customers get a £5 monthly discount, knocking the cheapest package’s price down to £7.50.

There are three packages on offer, all of which provide a 20Mbit/s maximum download speed and unlimited downloads – or rather, a fair-use policy that does not explicitly state a limit. You’ll also get a free wireless router and 150MB of web space, and there are no connection fees.

The three packages differ in the phone and line rental services that come with them. Simply Broadband is as the name suggests, and are for people who want to stick with their BT landline. It costs £15 a month, or £10 for Orange mobile customers. The other two packages require customers to have an Orange landline, which costs a little less for line rental than BT.

The Broadband & Anytime Calls package includes free calls to UK landlines at any time and costs £15 a month (£10 for Orange mobile customers) – not bad going considering that a similar package from BT costs £28 a month. For those who have a job to go to during the day, there’s the Broadband & Off Peak Calls package, at £12.50 or £7.50 a month

However, be warned that you’ll be tied to your decision for 18 months. Orange came in below average in our survey for reliability and ease of setup, and ratings for its technical support and overall customer satisfaction was remarkably poor. PlusNet’s Extra package costs about the same but comes with better approval from our survey respondents.

See the next page for a full break-down and individual ratings of Orange’s services and the results of our broadband survey.

Broadband survey performance results

These results were compiled from our online survey, where users were asked to rate their broadband supplier. In the case of customer satisfaction, this is an average of whether users would recommend their supplier and if they’re planning on staying with their current supplier.

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