My friend Stephen gave up on his 3G handset, and plugged his SIM card into a 2G handset to get on with his life. I borrowed his NEC c313 to play with.
I signed up for the cheapest plan (HK$183/month). HK$80/month rebate for 8 months. No contract. To take the SIM card away I paid HK$100, which is actually credit towards my first month subscription.
My plan comes with 150 minutes of video call. The sales person told me that any unused video call minutes is converted to basic voice call minutes, multiplied by five. No conversion the other way thou.
Video call is the killer application of 3G. Problem is, there ain’t that many 3G handsets out there. I don’t know anybody I could do video call with (I don’t think Stephen would appreciate me calling his SO too often, if at all.) It’s not like Orange’s 3G network is saturated with video calls, and they are losing tons of money on giving away and heavily subsidizing handsets anyway, they might well give out tons of video call minutes to get people hooked up. The thing is, video calls are far more engaging (and for both parties as well) than voice calls, so they are expected to be much shorter. Give say 800 video call minutes, chances are less than 5% of the customers may use them up. Skim on video call minutes, customers would just stick to cheaper voice calls, for good. The population at large don’t get to see the difference, and video call remains a gimmick.
BTW the NEC c313 isn’t really a very good video phone. It has no speaker phone, so you need the earphone (included in the package) to do video calls properly, otherwise the side of your head and not your face is what the other side gets to see.
I saw a neat demo of communicating with a 3G handset using MS NetMeeting at one of the 3 shops. I tried to set it up over the weekend without success. It’s fairly standard H.323 video conferencing stuff, which doesn’t work very well over NAT/Firewalls. And, who would be mad enough to expose a Windows computer directly to the Internet these days?
Orange’s 3G network is just like what Stephen described: awful. The handset is very optimistic on signal level, yet it has serious problem holding onto the line. My first call on Orange’s 3G network to mum was cut off suddenly, while signal was supposed to be strong.
9 responses so far ↓
1 James Mok // May 18, 2004 at 2:30 pm
2G Hutchison line receptions are still miles behind Sunday’s even when Sunday’s line is on single (PCS) band instead of the double (GSM/PCS) band that Hutchison uses.
When I bought a Nokia 2100 at the Nokia Mongkok showroom for mom for Mother’s Day, their line with a demo SIM card from Hutchison’s was breaking up at their counter area which was about 20ft from the door. I had to move halfway back towards the door before I could receive properly. I switched to my own Sunday SIM card and the reception was perfect right at the counter.
Needless to say, I have little faith in the future of Hutchison’s 3G if any at all.
2 tin_the_fatty // May 18, 2004 at 10:27 pm
It is not my experience that Sunday’s network is always far ahead of Orange’s 2G network. Orange seems to have network coverage in more elevators in Central, while Sunday has hardly any. There is virtually no reception for Sunday inside the IFC II building, while my colleagues using Orange 2G seem to be reasonably happy. I suppose it’s up to each operators’ customer profile and demography.
3 James Mok // May 19, 2004 at 7:29 am
In door problems are certainly easier to accept/explain than outdoor problems. User demographic does not fully explain the much more “breaking-up” calls received thru a land line from any Hutchison callers over the years compared to calls from other cell suppliers’. Yours and my dad’s Hutchison calls to my office land line for example came thru with about 40% of them breaking-up.
4 tin_the_fatty // May 19, 2004 at 11:16 am
I am not trying to defend Orange, as I think they are right at the bottom of the bunch.
The thing is, most of my Oranging colleagues are Islanders, and if they are happy, Orange must be doing something right. From another perspective, if Orange is as bad as you described then they should lose all their customers, yet they claim to be the biggest mobile operator in Hong Kong in respect of number of customers. They are not particularly cheap either.
There is this 10-90 rule: the top 10% of your problems consume 90% of your resources. Orange management probably takes this to heart. By getting rid of their top 10% difficult customers, they could save 90% of their cost.
You are not an Orange customer. You are therefore not their problem.
5 James Mok // May 19, 2004 at 2:36 pm
You are right. I was their customer for over 4 years with a max. of 3 of their SIM cards to my name at one time for over 2 years. They didn’t consider me as their problem when I was their customer, so they really have no reason to start considering now with anyone. I also have difficulty convincing my mom and dad to switch away even when they well know of their line problems with Orange for they are simply too lazy to switch.
6 John // May 22, 2004 at 1:37 am
I am using Orange right now, and it seems since they launched their 3G service, the 2G service has also suffered… breakups during calls, dropped calls, can’t make calls, everything going wrong.
I will be moving to Sunday. Unfortunately their Unlimited GPRS service is now $168, not $38 or $98 like before… so it is pretty expensive now.
How do you find GPRS service? I tried it in Mongkok and it was slooooooooooooooooooooow.
7 James Mok // May 22, 2004 at 7:15 am
GPRS as modem for web browsing is like using a 14.4 modem. For me, it has only been a “been there, done that” experience. Once my $38/mth special is over (maybe I’ll even cancel it), I’ll just leave it at pay-on-demand for WAP phone and forget about web browsing with computer/PDA.
Nice thing about Sunday is that they contact me to lower their service plan prices or up the talk time everytime. Whereas with Orange, even when I called them to inquire about their much lower street prices for their service plans, they even told me explicitly that they would “never” give me the lower prices as low as their street prices, but only at $60 more than their street prices is their lowest they would go for me. I had them cancelled all three of my lines with them right there and then.
8 tin_the_fatty // May 22, 2004 at 5:31 pm
GPRS was painful for any real work. I had trouble syncing my IMAP folders. I am happy to pay HK$38/month as a backup, but will cancel it if it is going up to HK$168. It just isn’t worth it.
OTOH, T-Mobile could do EDGE for US$10 flat, I don’t see why noone in Hong Kong could beat it.
9 James Mok // May 22, 2004 at 8:53 pm
EDGE should make life much better for wireless internet on the go. I hope we could have it soon at a reasonable price.