Orange relaunches with free broadband for all of its mobile customers
Orange will relaunch its home broadband service online on Monday with an offer of free broadband for all its pay monthly mobile customers. Previously the offer had been limited to pay monthly customers on a tariff of £30 or more. The offer is currently available in-store and on telesales but will be promoted online from Monday.
The company ceased promoting its home broadband service late last year to concentrate on dealing with connection and line quality problems which saw the company post a meagre 32,000 net new connections in Q1 this year, compared to 264,000 for Sky and 116,000 for Carphone Warehouse.
An Orange spokesperson confirmed to SamKnows that the company realised its service was not meeting customer expectations and hence wanted to get the engineers in for the best part of a year to improve it and then incentivise its mobile phone customers to sign up.
“We stopped marketing our home broadband service aggressively late last year so we could focus on improving the basics. This said, we regularly review all our customer offerings to ensure they remain competitive and, following positive feedback from consumers, have chosen to reintroduce the popular reward of free home broadband for all our pay monthly mobile customers.”
The company is now claiming to have fixed problems that have led to subscribers leaving the service and is confident it can regain trust within the broadband market. To underline the point, it is confirming that it has ramped up its local loop unbundling (LLU) effort in recent months so it can take over the whole line, and not simply resell BT connections.
Tags: Orange
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:29 am
When Orange really do sort out their problems, quite a few of which are caused by their Livebox, I may consider recommending them to others. Until then, though, Be* get my vote every time.
Did Orange tell SK what problems they were sorting out? A list would be nice to see.
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:21 pm
No, we’ve not got breakdown of the issues.
Whilst they’re unlikely to be willing to provide such information, it can’t hurt for us to ask!