Orange beats the crunch with £5 per month tariff
UK mobile operator Orange introduced a credit crunch busting mobile contract this week with a £5 per month tariff.
For budget conscious customers, Orange is now pitching a new £5 per month tariff alongside £10 and £15 monthly plans. All the contracts include a free handset but the stinger is that subscribers will need to sign up for 36 months, although they’re entitled to a handset upgrade after 18 months.
For a fiver a month customers get 50 minutes, 50 texts and a Nokia 2630 handset; at £10 they get 100 minutes, 300 texts and a Nokia 3600; and for £15 they get 200 minutes, unlimited texts and a Nokia 6500.
Orange is also introducing a range of 18 month SIM only contracts, starting at £10 a month for 100 minutes and 500 texts and going up to £30 per month for 1600 minutes, unlimited texts and 500MB of data.
Last week the operator tried tempting prepay users by launching the BlackBerry Curve 8900 on a pay as you go price plan. The Curve weighs in at £249.99 on a prepay tariff and follows the launch of the BlackBerry Pearl 8120 on prepay earlier this year.
We were intially quited excited to see this as we run a sim ony ( http://www.simonlyoffers.com )comparison site and this looks like a great deal so I was very dissapointed to find out this is only available instore. I wonder if this is a loss leader and Orange are hoping to make money on instore upsells? We tend to see Voda and O2 selling more sim only deals than Orange but this new deal certainly should sell well. I’d expect at least some of the other providers to react with new low cost deals of there own; although 3 are relatively new in this space they often lead the way in price cuts (as they have done with mobile broadband)so wouldn’t be suprised to see them slash their costs soon.
The SIM Only market is very competitive and will only get more and more competitive as the popularity of SIM Only accelerates. However, there are a lot of new mobile phones entering the market and the demand for these phones is high such as the Apple iPhone and Blackberry. These phones cost too much to buy SIM free so people are taking out long term contracts therefore the mobile network operators have increased the contract lengths to the likes of 24 months and now even 36 months.