[Dorian Gray]

Originally Posted by pscates2.0 Who would you see as a better fit (a non-lorry driving/prepubescent teen carrier)?

I suppose I exaggerated a little bit, but to be honest I've never met a lorry driver who hasn't been on O2. It just seems to be a part of the job, along with the overhanging gut and bad back.

But O2 competes on price alone. They'll sell absolutely anything the device manufacturers will offer them and they don't care a whit about branding their phones, or locking them, or anything like that (which is a good thing for the customer, but shows how small a part brand value plays in their success). Their data charges are very high, as are their international roaming charges, but they give you quite a lot of national minutes and texts for your money. Their ads are tacky and ridiculous, but I suppose they know their market because I believe they're marginally the largest operator in the UK (the big four have divided up their share of the market roughly evenly, but I believe O2 is marginally ahead, due to the aforementioned teens on Pay As You Go, no doubt). But I've used all of the big four and O2 were by far the least satisfactory. A couple of years ago they didn't even support text receipts (perhaps still the case?), so you had no idea whether your message was delivered or not.

Orange and Vodafone have historically been the brand-heavy networks. They try to offer a very comprehensive service with their own branded features. Orange in particular are very picky in choosing which devices to sell, testing them on their network first and then writing their own, vastly superior, manual for the device, rather than just bundling the incomprehensible gibberish from the device manufacturer. Orange and Vodafone are popular with businesses.

T-Mobile fall somewhere in between. They took over One-2-One's weak network and invested heavily in new towers a few years ago, spending over £2 million per day on infrastructure. They've then flogged this network capacity to "virtual operators" such as Virgin Mobile, as well as running a full service themselves.

The reason I thought Orange might have had a chance with the iPhone is that they have by far the largest EDGE network in the UK, and the iPhone uses EDGE. O2's EDGE network is nearly non-existent, so using the first-gen iPhone for actually surfing the net is going to be interesting. But everyone knows that the first-gen iPhone is only the beginning, so I'm sure the carriers were competing for future models that will actually work properly on the UK's network technology.

Originally Posted by Electric Monk Orange has some really bad customer relation issues right about now.

That's because of their broadband internet operation, not their mobile network, which continues to have the highest customer satisfaction figures in the industry, and deservedly so. But they bought Wanadoo, which was by far the worst ISP in the country, and tried to fit it into the Orange brand, a mistake of epic proportions that has sullied their network brand.

Originally Posted by AWR It strikes me that Slough is the setting for the original Office series (or am I lost).

Indeed! And presumably because it would be hard to find a more humourless and depressing town in the country.