Last week news of tariff increases for pay monthly customers came from both Orange and T-Mobile.
Well, it seems that Orange are at it again as letters have been sent to customers that elect to cover their prized handsets with Orange Care informing them of another price hike to take effect from 29th March 2013.
The price of Orange Care is rising from £6 to £7.99 per month – a rise of just over 33%
Orange are blaming the rise on the cost of today’s phones and associated claims costs.
More information can be found at the Orange website where it clearly states that you can cancel your policy at any time.
The more cynical among us will see this as a drive to push people towards EE’s new Clone Phone service which for prices ranging between £2 and £14 per month (handset dependent) will offer varying levels of cover for your handset.
There are 3 tiers to Clone Phone, Fully Loaded, Loaded and Lite.
Lite starts at £2 p/m for Orange / T-Mobile customers and offers 500mb cloud storage within which to backup your device.
Going slightly up the scale the Loaded offering gives 16GB storage and offers the Find My Phone service.
The top package is Fully Loaded and gives 16GB storage, Find My Phone and Phone insurance. For this you can expect to pay anything between £6 (which EE state will cover a Samsung Tocco) to £14 (covering an iPhone).
Of course, all options above can be found elsewhere for cheaper or even for free.
I’ve included the letter from Orange below for your perusal and my thanks go to long time reader Just Me for the tip off.
Nice write up Simon, I am gonna call up customer services to see what Clone Phone will cost me instead of Orange Care. I’m hoping it will be the £6 version and not the £8 version, won’t hold my breath though. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I called and complained – they dropped me to the next lower tariff which had 3x the data allowance and unlimited calls, and a guarantee of no increases on the new tariff until the end of my contract – I’m in the middle of a 2 year on my Note, and no increase in contract length. Always worth calling 150…
I think it is quite rude to increase the cost of this care package whilst you are in your contract. For a new customer, fair enough charge them more based on the reasons ‘the rise on the cost of today’s phones and associated claims costs’ etc.
But if you are already in a contract which you agreed to pay £X for the care package based on your original phone choice etc, it should be set and costs should not increase based on these reasons. Once you have your phone, it is not your fault future phone prices have increased or more people are claiming, that is the issue for Orange to cover these unexpected (i.e. someone did not evaluated the future market) costs.
I think Ofcom should force all networks to make sure there are no rises during a contract. A contract is a two way thing. You can’t turn round to the network and say you are leaving during your contract without paying them, so why is it ok for them to increase your bills?
When you sign a contract, you sign at a specified price. That’s like me taking out a contract with 500 mins per month and then using 600 and saying, well my needs have changed but I’m not paying you for those extra 100 minutes.