ORANGE UK -Beware!

I love Orange also!

I joined their network with a Sony J5e but, after a while, I got a Nokia 9210 as a gift. My experience with Orange is that it is best not to tell them.

When I came to end my contract with them, I changed my contract to PAYG. When I registered it, they asked what phone I had and, upon deciding to be honest, told them I had a Nokia 9210.

They promptly told me that this wasn't possible because they don't a have a 9210 on their network (doh!). I told them that they did, that I was looking at their website and that it says "Orange has a 9210 on its network", but the chap said "No we don't".

I gave up, and said "Ok, I have a Sony J5e" and he was happy (such simple things please some folk).

I sympathise with you, and recommend that if you have been with Orange that long, downgrade your Orange Contract, and start another one with someone like O2 who will give you a SIM card and no phone (if that is what you want).

What I can't understand is that if you wanted to buy your 7650 from Orange, they would have wanted to claim some money back through the contract, but you bought your 7650 from someone else and so it wouldn't hurt Orange at all to give you MMS. In fact, they'd be making more money out of you! What is it with these companies who has stools for brains! Like, Doh!?

Orange... strange bunch of people...

If you are looking for sim only deal, go to mobil-one.com . they are the cheapest sim card only deal people I found. Beware that their vodafone contract is with Singlepoint and Singlepoint does not support GPRS. Can't advise you on their O2 contract.

mobileshop.com also does sim only deal and when I got my sim card from them last year their Voda contract is with Cellular Operation Ltd. However their sim card deal are much more expensive compared with mobil-one... the last time I check.

Adrian

Odd, whenever I've upgraded my handset on Orange my Sim Card has just been transferred to the new handset. That said I've never had to ring Orange up for owt.

I should get my 7650 sim free tomorrow, not sure if I am doing right after reading the boards!!

Should I tell O that I have a T68 upgraded to T68i and then be able to get MMS enabled?

I have a T68 now, and could get it upgraded to a t68i 😊

I hesitate to mention this because I feel I am about to open myself up to a whole world of crap and abuse ( 😉 ) but, yes, I work for Orange...

I'm afraid I don't work on the customer-facing side of things, nor in retail, products etc, rather, on the business side of things. So I don't know about all those kinda things and can't off you any direct advice / solutions.... BUT, what I was going to offer was, I will look into it for you and see what can be done about it. I have a vested interest actually - I too bought a sim-free 7650 from an external source and while I haven't got around to MMS-ing it up yet, I have been meaning to. I can't *believe* there isn't a way round it... and will shout quite loudly through internal channels 'til I find an answer! At very least there may be something sneaky we can do 😃 There are internal people I can talk to.

One bit of advice - from experience! - if you have the patience, keeping trying with customer service. They deal with so much abuse day in day out, some of them are less than 'amenable', shall we say, when you finally get through to them. But there are good and helpful people there as well - you just have to be lucky enough to get one of them! That being said, I know Orange can be a bit 'stubborn' on certain issues sometimes...

Will let you know if I get anywhere....

i too have a simfree 7650 pay as u go orange,,, i cant set up my email or get gprs or mms they told me the way to get it is get afree phone on contract which has all the services then swap the sims over but i dont want to do that let me know when someone comes up with an idea

[quote="Anonymous"]i too have a simfree 7650 pay as u go orange,,, i cant set up my email or get gprs or mms they told me the way to get it is get afree phone on contract which has all the services then swap the sims over but i dont want to do that let me know when someone comes up with an idea[/quote]

Definitely no MMS on PAYG for a couple more months at least... (and no network interoperability until "early next year"...) - that you definitely can't get around I'm afraid.

jupiter090 - many thanks for your reply - I really appreciate your help and look forward to hearing from you.

John

Just to detract a moment...

How much is MMS on other networks, and are you really prepared to pay it?

I am with T-Mobile UK and they told me it would be �20 a month for 10Mb of data transffered.
Suffice to say I told them where they could shove there 10Mb as there is no way I was willing to pay that. There are so few people around with camera phones and there was no way I could justify paying �240 a year for a service I could hardly use.

When they start dropping their prices to Pay-As-You-Use standards like they did with SMS then I may consider using it.

When I got my 7650 I had the same quandry - what to do? I had a long standing existing contract with BT Cellnet (oops O2) for my 9210 and a number of freebie phones (i.e. old motorola's given away with credit cards) that ran on One-2-One (ooops T-Mobil). I spent a mornind surfing the poorly designed web sites of the operators (Orance, O2, T-Mobil) to find little in the way of advice (... everything you want to know about nothing and bugger all actual guidance).

I then rang the 'customer service' desks of Orange, O2 and T-Mobil ... only to give up in frustration. "No we don't have GPRS (on T-Mobil) but we do have MMS" (600 photo's I was told was ample) ... but at Orange I was told I could "not transfer SIMs ... and the software needs to be changed" I of course found myself explaining the realities of the devices to these poor souls who man the 'help' desks.

In then ended up wandering up the high street to find someone who could actually help ... finally spoke to someone who had a 7650 in an O2 store who told me what magic words to mention to the help desk there to at least get GPRS enabled on my existing SIM. But still no MMS from 02.

Knowing what a brand concious, fun loving, customer (ef)facing organisation that Orance is, I was amazed at their attitudes and lack of flexibility over these sorts of things.

So what were the magic words you used to get GPRS enabled??

I rang the Customer Service desk and asked about having GPRS added ... after getting transferred several times I finally go through to the provisioning people (not sure of the right term for them),

Apparently I needed to mention PAN, or was it APN ... I cant remember, that stood for something like Auto Provision Network. When it came to configuring the phone I got the girlie to read out the details for the 8310 and then worked it out from there (not too hard).

I phoned up Orange and bought an upgrade handset off them directly. They sent out the 7650 and a new SIM card which I had to activate. If you had asked this question a couple of days earlier I could have tried my old SIM in the 7650 and tried to receive/send a MMS message.

The new and old SIM card both look identical and even had the same picture printed on it. No idea if the actual chip was a different revision though. You may want to try and phone them up again to see if somebody else would be more helpful?

I used to have a Ericsson R520m and had GPRS enabled even though they didn't support the R520m officially. I just phoned them up and ask for GPRS to be turned on along with HSCSD and they did it all over the phone for me in a couple of hours. They did ask what phone I was using and when I told them I had a R520m they said they couldn't guarantee it would work. I told them to turn it on anyway and that I understood it might not work.

- Trevor

As I have explained to John, there is not good news on this front. It appears the problem with offline handsets is not to do with software issues, rather it is a factor of unregistered IMEI numbers not being recognised by the network (for MMS purposes). As a result, currently, they have taken the position of not signing anyone up for MMS unless they have an Orange-registered handset. This is unfortunately a throw-back from that whole mobile phone security issue that blew up a while back.

I don't even know what to suggest now - they need to reverse their policy of not allowing registration of offline IMEI numbers for us to be able to use MMS. The only thing we can do is persistently register our displeasure / complaints - if they get enough, eventually they will have to do something about it.

If you want this explained better than I have (I may have missed something) - call 156 from your Orange phone to get Wirefree Technical support - they're pretty good, they'll explain it all. But at the end of the day, unfortunately, they have their policies they have to stick to.

Don't try and become a customer of Orange for your externally sourced 7650 ... wait for O2 (or Vodafone) to get their shit together.

On the flip side I suppose it's good to see that they are taking the security issue involving the IMEI numbers seriously, unlike other networks.

[quote="SwitchBlade"]On the flip side I suppose it's good to see that they are taking the security issue involving the IMEI numbers seriously, unlike other networks.[/quote]

I appreciate that that's why they're doing it... in fact it is rather ironic that that policy has won them praise in the past (attempting better mobile phone security) and is now going to come back and shoot them in the foot. However, it seems a little OTT to me - there's no reason they couldn't allow registration of IMEI numbers on viewing a legitimate sale receipt for the offline phone. Would immediately solve all our problems.

It is a little traitorous of me to say, but I would urge any of you with this problem to lodge your dissatisfaction / a complaint with them - only volume of interest will get something like this changed - it's all management decision.

Im not sure if this will help but i recently got an offline 7650 phone and am using my orange sim card in it. I have gone through the same problems most people have gone through in the previous posts with orange not willing to enable mms because it is not and orange phone etc etc. So i rang up 156 stating that i had a t68 with an upgrade and they have activated it for me now, i received the txt message yesterday with the setup files and is now working fine. 8)

So you passd your phone as a T68. I was going to do this but not sure if it would work. So can you send mms messages to email adresses using your Orange sim? Also did you have to give your IMEI number.

Can't help on the MMS front, but for High Speed Data or GPRS, try this.

I bought a cheap Orange phone from CarPhone Warehouse on OVP for the Virgin Tariff. Must have got the price wrong or something, as I got a 3330 or something for �50 (almost a year ago, Virgin Tariff is not subsidised, following day price went up by �50).

Anyway, I wanted to use the sim with the 9210 for high speed data. Called them, and they moaned about the phone not being High Speed enabled etc. I explained I had a 9210, but no luck, not supported etc.

So I phoned again and told them that work had supplied me with a Nokia PCCard modem and the idea was for me to use the sim with that for dial up connections. Since they supported that model, they upgraded the sim, no questions asked.

Perhaps it's because they don't expect you to have 2 contracts to use a PC card or something.

Zuber

That was all i did, they didn't ask me for no IMEI. So give it a go the worst they can do is say no again. 😊

Back to an earlier problem in this thread...

After losing a sim card, my friend phoned Orange Care to get it replaced, to which he was told off about Sim swapping. The operator listed every phone that his sim has been used in. Anyhow, he got round their "No Sim Swap" policy by simply stating that Orange themselves suggest that you need to sim swap if you're going to be roaming abroad.

In the end Orange swallowed their words and gave in due to their own contradiction! Don't let them use that excuse for not allowing you to change phones 😉

Merlin - can you please tell me exactly where Orange suggest you sim swap when roaming. This will help my current ongoing argument with them.

Thanks

Sorry, but I can't find the information on their website. However, try phoning them up and ask about putting your sim in another phone if you were going abroad.

When we didn't have dual band and tri band phones, they recommended that you obtain a phone in the country you were visiting and place your original sim in it. That's not as common now, but I don't see any information telling you that you can't swap your sim either!

Just keep complaining to them and even threaten to leave Orange. They often back down on that,.....but don't take my word for it! :evil:

Doh!
Should have logged in before making that last post!!! :roll: