Orange Broadband

Most people who had Orange Broadband never consciously chose it as their internet provider. The service was assembled from the remnants of two earlier brands, existed under the Orange name for just six years, and was quietly replaced by EE before most customers noticed. Throughout its life it was primarily a mobile phone company that also sold home internet, and that tension was never fully resolved.

Where it all started: Freeserve to Wanadoo, 1998–2006

Before Orange Broadband existed, there was Freeserve: one of the UK's first major internet providers, launched in 1998 by Dixons, the high street electronics retailer. At a time when getting online meant paying a monthly subscription fee just to connect, Freeserve dispensed with that charge entirely. You bought a PC from Dixons, installed their software, and you were online. The model proved enormously popular. Within a couple of years Freeserve had more than two million customers, more than BT's own internet service at the time.

In 2000, a French company called Wanadoo (itself owned by France Télécom) bought Freeserve. The Freeserve name was kept for a few years before being dropped in April 2004, when the whole service was rebranded as Wanadoo UK. By this point, the UK was well into the shift from dial-up to broadband, and Wanadoo was competing in that market with an already large base of existing customers. Then, in June 2006, France Télécom decided to bring all of its consumer brands worldwide under a single name: Orange. Wanadoo UK disappeared overnight, and Orange Broadband took its place.

What Orange Broadband offered

Orange entered the broadband market with a clear selling point: if you were already an Orange mobile customer on a contract of £30 a month or more, you could receive home broadband at no extra charge. For the mid-2000s this was a genuinely good deal, and it attracted a lot of customers happy to bundle their phone and internet under one bill.

Those who wanted broadband without a mobile tie-in paid around £18 a month for a package with a 2GB monthly data limit; unlimited use cost roughly £10 more. The service also included a landline option, combining broadband, calls and line rental in a single monthly package. Orange supplied its own router (the Livebox on higher-tier plans), which included a built-in phone socket for making calls over the internet.

The pricing was broadly competitive for the period, though not a market leader. Orange was following rather than setting the pace: it cut its entry-level prices only after rivals including BT and Wanadoo had already done the same.

Behind the scenes: a troubled service

The product on paper looked reasonable. The experience in practice was another matter. Orange ran much of its broadband over BT's wholesale network, which it later attempted to supplement by installing its own equipment directly into telephone exchanges (a process known as local loop unbundling). The rollout was troubled. Customers reported connections going down for days, emails failing to arrive and serious difficulties when trying to cancel. A dedicated complaints website, OrangeProblems.co.uk, had been running since the Wanadoo days and continued to log unresolved grievances throughout Orange's tenure.

By 2007 this had become a mainstream story. The BBC's Watchdog programme published a consumer survey naming Orange the worst internet provider in the UK. Nearly seven in ten Orange broadband customers said they were unhappy with the service; two thirds reported serious problems when trying to leave. The same year, the UK's data protection watchdog found that Orange had been sharing customers' personal details with third-party sales companies without their consent. In 2009, Orange attempted to raise prices mid-contract for customers locked into an agreed rate. The backlash was sufficient to force a full reversal.

In 2010, Orange handed the day-to-day running of its broadband network to BT. The move was widely read as an acknowledgement that in-house management had not served customers well.

The handover to EE, 2010–2012

In April 2010, Orange's parent company and Deutsche Telekom (the German firm behind T-Mobile UK) merged their British operations into a joint venture called Everything Everywhere, later shortened to EE. Orange as a legal entity ceased to exist at that point, though the brand was kept alive while the new company established itself.

In October 2012, EE rebranded Orange Broadband as EE Broadband, timed to coincide with the launch of the UK's first 4G mobile network. Customers who still had an Orange-branded router found the name on its settings page updated by a software patch a few days later. The Orange mobile brand held on a little longer; new mobile customers could still join Orange until February 2015, before that too was wound down. BT bought EE in January 2016 for £12.5 billion, completing a journey that had taken the original Freeserve customer base from a Dixons counter in 1998 to one of Britain's largest telecoms groups.

What happened to customers?

All Orange Broadband customers were transferred to EE when the rebrand took effect in 2012. For most, this meant a change of branding on their router interface, correspondence and billing; the underlying service continued on the same network. Customers could move to new EE plans or remain on their existing deal. Given EE was itself later absorbed into BT, those same customers are today likely to be on BT or EE services, many of them unaware of quite how long their account history stretches back.

In summary

Orange Broadband's story is largely the story of what happens when a phone company treats home internet as an add-on rather than a core product. The free broadband offer bundled with mobile contracts was popular, the brand was well-known, but the underlying service and the customer support behind it fell consistently short. When EE replaced the Orange name in 2012, most customers found a different logo on their router and carried on. The brand's own creator later remarked that its parent company had been wearing it down for years. That verdict, from the outside, seems about right.