Orange offers mobile-broadband combo in U.K., plans rebrand of Orange, Wanadoo |
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Thu, 01 Sep 2005 09:05
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LONDON: French carrier France Telecom is all set to sell a combined mobile and fixed-line offer in Britain at a highly competitive price. It is unifying its Orange mobile service and Wanadoo Internet unit to offer an affordable (9.9 pounds a month) broadband service for cell phone customers.
Called the Wireless & Talk package, the service gives customers Web speeds of 2 megabits-per-second as well as an Internet phone-calling service, the company said. It will be available to new as well as existing customers (who were in the last three months of their contract).
Wanadoo's chief executive officer for U.K. Eric Abensur said the offer "marks the start of an exciting future of compelling deals for customers of Wanadoo and Orange".
Other broadband service providers like BT Group Plc., Tiscali and AOL charge 15.99 pounds to 29.99 pounds a month for services with speeds ranging from 1 to 2 megabits-per-second.
Orange UK also said it is cutting down the rates of its cheapest 3G high-speed mobile phone service by 50 per cent to 12.50 pounds per month. It has some 92,000 3G customers in the country.
The company, which has some 14.4 million customers in the U.K., had taken on Bernard Ghillebaert as its chief executive. He had successfully started a fixed and mobile bundled service in Belgium as CEO of the Orange unit, Mobistar.
France Telecom intends to rebrand Orange and Wanadoo as Orange by next year-end in the U.K., France, the Netherlands and Spain under its New Experience in Telecom services (NExT) proposals. However, the strategy may attract regulators' attention, since the company is a dominant player at least in France in both mobile and Internet services and discounting or bundling the two services may not be permitted.
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