Mobile Network Comparison

Bad news for the New Year: Orange have recently announced that they are putting their prices up 4.34% from 8 January 2012. Now while 4.34% may not seem like much, if you are on a standard £30 monthly contract that’s already an extra £15.60 a year which definitely makes a difference.

These price increases come shortly after they increased their PAYG rates by up to 50%. Other greedy companies raising their prices this year have included ASDA Mobile, Giffgaff and Vodafone.

Cheekily, even if you have a fixed charge contractual agreement with Orange they are forcing the price increase on you and claiming you can’t get out of the remaining contract. They claim that their small print has allowed them to raise the price to any amount below the Retail Prices Index inflation figure without resulting in a break of contract. As the inflation rate according to the Retail Prices Index is 5.4%, they are marginally below. So even if you only signed up a couple of months ago, you along with millions of their other customers, are subject to this price increase.

We find these increases pretty abhorrent, especially as customers are already under financial pressure from rising energy, food and transport bills in these hard times. If you think that Orange are acting like Scrooge by making these charges around Christmas, you can definitely complain about it and possibly get out of your contract. Ofcom have recommended that customers challenge these price hikes directly with Orange. If that doesn’t get you anywhere, contact Ofcom directly and also make a complaint to the Communications and Internet Services Adjudication Scheme.

Please also let us know how you get on if you’re with Orange and are trying to fight these charges.

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An IT consulting and technology firm in Cambridge has managed to get a mobile network up and running on a Raspberry Pi board. PA Consulting Group has won numerous awards for its innovative projects before but the latest hack is probably the most impressive. They’ve managed to get a full-blown GSM cell base-station to run on the $25 computer.

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny single-board computer that is very low priced yet have power features and hardware and can run Linux. When it was first released earlier this year, it made headlines and quickly sold out many times over. It has a speedy ARM processor, a USB port, HDMI interface and was designed to help today’s youth learn to do proper computer programming.

It was invented by Cambridge University professors who also work in the area’s Silicon Fen tech industry and has proven to be massively popular for a variety of inventive applications. It’s sold not-for-profit and people have used it to make a physical drum kit out of vegetables, a high altitude balloon pretty much a do it yourself space probe) and a voice-controlled robot arm. It can even play Quake III.

However, this is the first time someone has managed to run a mobile phone network on the hardware. The idea was to show how you don’t always need expensive specialist hardware – sometimes, bulk-produced off the shelf solutions can be usable. This proof of concept demonstration shows that the cheap and minuscule computer can successfully do everything a base station needs to do such and route voice calls and text messages over a GSM network.

The method used open source software such as OpenBTS which implements the GSM mobile standard and FreeSWITCH which routes the traffic and interfaces the platform to the internet. It wasn’t that simple though, the engineers had to write their own routines in python then optimise the code for the Raspberry Pi. They also used a special radio interface to connect to the Raspberry Pi from the mobile phones. Check out this fascinating video for more:

What do you think? Is this just an interesting test or would it be possible to expand this to use in the real world? Are you tempted to get a Raspberry Pi or have you got one already? And what do you think the coolest thing someone’s done so far with these computers?

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The Nokia Lumia 800 is the latest Windows Mobile 7 smartphone. It comes with the revolutionary and simple live tiles interface, free Nokia sat nav software, a clear OLED screen and a top notch camera.

However, with rising tariffs rates and astonishing up-front prices for high-end phones it is increasingly hard to get a modern smartphone. Having the cash in hand for a brand new iPhone 4S is hard enough but falling into a 24 month contract can really put a dent in your budget. And that’s not even considering the masses of small print, overage charges and extras that get people like you paying even more money than you signed up for.

To make things worse about mobile phone contracts, Orange just increased their rates by 4.35% even if you’re already in the middle of a contract. This is clearly a real bummer, so today we’re going to look at how to save yourself some bucks with the new Nokia Lumia 800.

Orange

We want to look only at the contract deals which give you the phone for free. The one we found with the Nokia Lumia 800 free on Orange is currently £36 monthly. Included in this is:

• 600 minutes
• Unlimited texts
• 1GB mobile internet

Of course, the actually price you’ll pay after the Orange price increase is £37.56 a month. This equates to an additional £37 over the 24 month contract.

That makes a total of £901.44! Surely there must be better deals that don’t cost nearly a grand for 2 years use?

Vodafone

Another contract deal that includes the Nokia Lumia 800 free is from Vodafone on a similarly priced offer:

• 900 minutes
• Unlimited texts
• 750MB mobile internet

This costs £36 a month for 2 years which works at at £1.56 less per month compared to Orange’s deal after January 8th. You also get an extra 300 minutes. The only sacrifice is a loss of 250MB of data, but if you prefer call time over internet use then this maybe for you. The total cost is £864 over the whole 24 month contract. ⇒ Get this deal now ⇐

3

Probably the best contract deal for the Nokia Lumia 800 is from 3. There you can get the phone for free on a low-priced £30/month tariff. This includes:

• 500 minutes
• 5000 texts
• 1GB mobile internet

This offers a great balance between calls and texts and, importantly, offers a full 1GB of included mobile data. The total over the whole two year contract is only £720. ⇒ Get this deal now ⇐.

However, this is in a contract so who knows what could be hiding in the small print especially as they could follow Orange and increase prices by up to 5.4%. Also, you should be aware of extra charges – for example, if you typically used 1GB of data on a smartphone like this, you might face huge additional charges after exceeding your 750MB limit.

Giffgaff

Contracts can offer great value but they are not for everybody. If you want to steer clear of a contract but still get a great phone like the Nokia Lumia 800, you can go SIM free. This is the budget option but, if you don’t need lots of minutes, it can work out great.

The phone currently costs only £429.99 from Amazon with free delivery. Then you need to order a free micro-SIM from PAYG network Giffgaff (this is because the Nokia Lumia 800 can’t take normal-sized SIM cards.

Then look at Giffgaff’s great value goodybags – their rolling monthly tariffs. If you want a budget option, their £10 goodybag will give you:

• 900 minutes
• Unlimited texts
• Unlimited mobile internet

For £10/month, truly unlimited internet is astounding as you are likely to be able to use data at your hearts content. it’s the perfect match for a data-hungry phone like the Lumia 800. If you chose this method there is less call time per month, but if you are going to be spending this much money on a new smart phone it’s likely that data usage will play a very important roll in your new mobile’s life. What’s more, Giffgaff call charges are very low and all your calls to other Giffgaff mobiles are completely free all the time.

So for £429.99, plus a £10 goodybag for 24 months comes to £670 – that’s over £200 cheaper than Orange’s deal!

A pricer alternative is the £20 goodybag which offers:

• 800 minutes
• Unlimited texts
• Unlimited mobile internet

Once again, you have to buy the phone in advance from Amazon then order the £20 goodybag. This comes to a total cost of ownership over two years of £910 but if you want to make use of the unlimited data it’s definitely worth it. You also won’t have to worry about going over your limits and having to pay overage charges. So if you don’t want a contract, its possible to get a great deal by going SIM free and choosing a PAYG network instead.

Summary

The above graph should show you what the various options are and, as it has calculations for total cost of ownership, makes it clear which deal would be cheapest for you.

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