The enhanced network these areas will enable Orange customers, living, working or travelling across these areas to experience faster 3G data service.
Further enhancements include: more reliable combined voice and data service; 99% call set-up success rate; and a faster variant of 3G/HSDPA will be rolled out and will support mobile broadband in the very near future.
The Orange 3G network includes cities and towns, as well as major roads, rail routes, business parks, conference centres, hotels and airports. 3G access is important to Orange, it said, as more people rely on both voice and data communications while out and about for work or pleasure.
Peter Marsden, vice president of IT and networks, commented:
“A robust and reliable network is at the heart of everything we do at Orange and we are dedicated to ensuring our customers in each and every region of the UK feel the benefit of this. We are investing heavily to improve our network and this investment is one step closer to our goal of becoming the best UK network for coverage and reliability by 2009.”
While the 3G network improvement takes place any vital downtime in each of the regions will be fully communicated to all customers well in advance, Orange stated. The 2G network will still be available throughout the process and the changes will have limited affect on 2G access or voice calls, it claimed.