News - Orange and T-Mobile reveal the scale of their ambition

[HEXUS]

The UK joint venture will be modestly named Everything Everywhere and will be our biggest mobile operator.

Read more.

[scaryjim]

Am I reading those numbers right? 30 billion customers? Or should it be 30 million? In which case, we tend to use dots to separate decimals, not commas

[Scott B]

Am I reading those numbers right? 30 billion customers? Or should it be 30 million? In which case, we tend to use dots to separate decimals, not commas

Good point, however that's how Orange delivered the figures so I'll leave it as that until they advise otherwise.

[SuGaR847]

Actually the international standard changed a few decades ago. Ofically in the SI unit system the comma separates decimal places. The dot is a remain of the older imperial unit system...

[Bunjiweb]

So when will my signal at home get better because of the merger? I am glad to see this progress, but when will the real world effects of the merger be obvious?

Ben

[Funkstar]

^^ This

Although it's the signal at my better halfs place I'm more concerned about. This is what is making me lean towards Vodafone when my contract is up.

[SiM]

Orange is a subsidiarity of a French company (France Télécom), and the French switch . and , for numbers and decimals. Dunno why, just to be different I guess.

[Brewster0101]

Hopefully they will come up with some new tariffs that include large amount of data usage. With other operators putting 500mb on data usage per month in an age where data usage is on the up, they must be a hole in the market.

[crossy]

Hopefully they will come up with some new tariffs that include large amount of data usage. With other operators putting 500mb on data usage per month in an age where data usage is on the up, they must be a hole in the market.

Couldn't agree more - I'm with Three PAYG at the moment, so I was thinking of migrating to a contract phone - probably something from HTC. Checked the price plans and saw "Unlimited internet" then checked further and found "Unlimited"=500MB Sorry that's not my definition of "Unlimited"! Worse still, if you want more than that it's going to cost an extra £5pm and you get the limit bumped to 2GB. Surely this is misleading advertising?. That said, Vodafone are no better when I took a look at them at the weekend.

Okay, I'm probably being daft about it, but it strikes me that if you're into Facebook, Twitter, Spotify etc then it's likely that you'll hit the 500MB monthly limit very regularly and then get hammered by the 10p/MB "out-of-plan" rate. So I agree with you - if someone was to offer me an HTC Desire and 2GB/pm internet for less than £30pm then I'd probably be interested.

It'll also be interesting to see who EE take their customer service level from - Orange or T-Mobile. I've always found T-Mobile (got an Internet dongle from them) to be quite good, whereas Orange appear to be notoriously bad. Just as long as EE keep up the "turn your phone off" ads in the cinema ...

Bob

[superscaper]

Actually the international standard changed a few decades ago. Ofically in the SI unit system the comma separates decimal places. The dot is a remain of the older imperial unit system...

Do you have a reference for that? As far as I know the official stance by the different Weights and Measurements bodies on SI is that officially either dots or commas can be used for thousands separators/decimals. There's not really an official definition for it in SI because SI is more about units and prefixes rather than how numbers themselves are displayed.

[Funkstar]

Do you have a reference for that? As far as I know the official stance by the different Weights and Measurements bodies on SI is that officially either dots or commas can be used for thousands separators/decimals. There's not really an official definition for it in SI because SI is more about units and prefixes rather than how numbers themselves are displayed.

Seems it can be either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator

The map at the bottom gives a good illustration of which counties use which method. Generally speaking though, metric is 'dot' for thousands and comma for decimals. Imperial measurements use the opposite (and as the UK is caught between metric and imperial, we use imperial notation for metric figures )

[TheAnimus]

notice how the only important countries are blue.......