Businesses to get free broadband access courtesy of Orange

An offer of free broadband access on its Solo plan has recently been announced by Orange to any businesses who sign up to the service.

Self employed users and small businesses are who the scheme is aimed for, according to Orange. All users that sign up to the Solo Mobile plan, which cost £30 per month, will also get the fixed line broadband for Business service free of charge.

The Solo Mobile service offers users a speed of up to 8Mbps for download speeds, unlimited downloads and also a free wireless router. Both the Voice and the broadband cost are all included on a single bill and free customer support will be provided for all users.

After improvements were made to its network earlier this year Orange offered its customers free broadband access. Due to improved network capabilities the Internet Service Provider (ISP) can now offer its customers much quicker speeds and the standard now is 8Mbps.

Director of SME, Orange Business UK, Martin Lane said “The improvements in the quality of our broadband network mean we can now offer faster broadband for free to our small business customers, with all the support they need to get up and running. It’s making broadband more affordable and accessible for small business customers.”

Research firm, Point-Topic revealed in statistics it has recently released that due to the economic problems faced by the nation UK broadband has had a lot of problems lately.

Between the months of July and September this year it was found that the number of additional line added has, in comparison to earlier predictions, fallen by 20%.

With an addition of 60 000 new lines in the recent period it seems that Virgin media are doing well although 70 000 lines were lost over the same timeframe by BT. In the second half of 2008 Point-topic estimated that just 620 000 connections will be rolled out, whilst a 1.1 million estimate for 2009 falls short of original predictions by 200 000.