Orange is top for reliability in survey

Orange has come top in Oftel's annual mobile call reliability survey for the second year running. Around the UK, 97.7% of calls made on the Orange network were successfully completed.

Orange was ahead of BT Cellnet on 96.5% and Vodafone on 96.3%, despite these two having more established networks.

Last for the second year running was One2One on 95.6%. The tests were carried out between October 1999 and March 2000, with 30,000 test calls being made. All motorways and 70 conurbations were covered.

Orange came top in all regions with the exception of Scotland and East Anglia. All four companies are now developing third generation networks to enable them to offer faster data services to their customers.