Mobile Network Comparison

Tom Alexander will resign from the UK’s biggest mobile network, Everything Everywhere (made up of France’s Orange and Germany’s T-Mobile). He will step down at the end of August to be replaced by Olaf Swantee, the current head of France Telecom’s European mobile operations, but Alexander will remain on in a consultative role for the remainder of 2011.

The industry gossip is that France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom who jointly own Everything Everywhere had got fed up with the slow growth at and were frustrated with Tom Alexander’s inability to cut costs following the merger. Alexander had spearheaded the joining of Orange and T-Mobile only a year ago creating the UK’s biggest mobile network with 28 million customers in Britain. Before that, he had who famously made millions with Virgin Mobile, the UK’s first virtual network and had run Orange twice.

However, some thought that his successes at Virgin Mobile and Orange were simply down to luck and, since the start of this year Everything Everywhere reported a 2% decline in revenue and a significant drop in new customers. The £3.5bn of cost savings demanded were also far from being met.

In an internal email he sent announcing his resignation, Alexander said, “It’s been a fabulous three and half years here … I have been impressed by the brightness, the talent, and the dedication of those that I have worked with, and I’ve made some great new friends.” He went on to write, “I am deeply proud of all that we have achieved together – forming the largest mobile telecommunications business in the UK”.

However, he also said “I feel it is now the right moment to hand over the reins to somebody else”. Sources within the mobile industry suspect that Everything Everywhere will now also lose a huge number of senior executives who had followed Alexander in from Virgin Mobile. This news leaves a slightly uncertain future for Everything Everywhere who are now under pressure to deliver savings to shareholders which will inevitably cost several jobs in the UK.

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We’ve had a good look at a newish virtual network and our Now Mobile review is now up. It’s a fairly unique network in that it not only has fantastic international calling rates but also really solid UK prices too. And, as it runs on Orange, it also has great coverage.

We’ve written an account of the company’s history and also have given an in-depth analysis of their pricing and all the bundles and deals they are offerings. We think we’ve covered just about everything in our review but if you have any comments or experiences you want to share, please let us know. If you’ve used Now Mobile, don’t forget to leave a rating too.

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T-Mobile has been accused of “failing its customers” after it recently emerged that it has been charging extra for calling LycaMobile. The details get even worse – T-Mobile silently and sneakily removed all LycaMobile numbers from its inclusive bundles leaving several customers with huge surprise bills.

LycaMobile claim that the issue has been ongoing for some time and they have complained to Ofcom and Trading Standards about the issue. A spokesman claimed that T-Mobile should be upfront about these hidden costs and said that, “In short, what they appear to have done is reach their own commercial decision as to what to include as either ‘in‘ or ‘out‘ of its bundles, and now confuse the position with references to jargon. T-Mobile is clearly failing its customers”.

T-Mobile responded by claiming that LycaMobile had excessively ramped up its Mobile Termination Rates (MTRs) which are charges between networks for terminating calls into different networks. A representative said “While Ofcom have introduced some recent changes to mobile termination rates, responsibility for call-bundle policy, including which numbers are classed as inside and outside of bundle, sits with all the major network operators”. T-Mobile claim that LycaMobile’s MTRs are much higher than other mobile networks‘ and so their numbers were removed from inclusive bundles.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that LycaMobile’s MTRs are actually regulated by and in line with Ofcom. We think that T-Mobile’s behaviour is especially despicable as there’s no reasonable way for customers to know in advance whether an 07- mobile number belongs to a LycaMobile customer or not and therefore, no way to know your costs in advance. In light of this, we can only suggest that existing T-Mobile customers look out for a cheaper mobile network and consider porting their number over especially if they frequently call LycaMobile customers.

Looking at the other mobile networks in the UK, it turns out that Vodafone also charges extra to certain networks although it would not admit which these were. They also claimed to have informed their customers about these additional charges. 3 have not responded to a request for comment while O₂ and Orange come out of this looking much better as they both have confirmed that they charge a flat rate to all networks and include all mobile numbers in their call bundles.

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