Ofcom consumer research has come out with its new report which claims that the Orange provides the tardiest mobile internet
service in the UK. The company's 3G service is used by almost 17 percent of UK household, which provides average speed of about 1.4Mbps only.
O2, on the other hand, provides the fastest 3G service. Its average speed ranges between 2.5 Mbps and 3 Mbps. O2 service also offers fastest web page download. The remaining three major carriers Three, Vodafone and T-Mobile have been placed between O2 and Orange. T-Mobile barely scraped by Orange to avoid being placed at the bottom of the list. The report also suggested that the condition is not likely to improve much until 4G protocol is implemented in the country. It is rumored that BT is planning to launch a trial 4G service soon.
However, Orange is not all too happy with the assessment. The report results are based on the data collected between September and December 2010. Orange has now openly questioned the methodology behind the report. It claims that the study took into account mobile broadband access via dongles only. The carrier said that dongles are a small part of its overall 3G services. It further said that most of its users access 3G services through their smartphones and this important demography has been excluded from the study. Further, Orange claimed that since the data is more than 6 months old and therefore cannot be taken as the representative of current performance. Oh Orange, you are protesting too much.
As expected, the report has been welcomed by O2 and it did not waste any time in patting its own back. Epitiro, the company responsible for conducting tests for this report claimed that Orange is crying foul now and that it did not express any concern about the methodology earlier.