WTF? Virgin -----> Orange? MIND****!!!

Cleeecooo

Cleeecooo

Cleeecooo

Soldato
Joined
8 Oct 2010
Posts
22,382
Location
Purley - Croydon
Hi everyone,

al of a sudden today my Virgin connection turned to orange?! I was left with no internet but had good phone signal. Everyone else around me who's on Virgin also had the same thing happen to them. This has always been a area with excellent 3G signal and all of a sudden it stopped working :(

I know Virgin use T-mobile's signal and tmob and orange are erged, but why was I left with no internet?

Thanks
 
I would imagine you have t-mobiles apn settings for internet access. If you are now connecting through the orange network you will need to update your apn settings.
 
Reboot your phone. Virgin is an MVMO - virtual network who uses T-M's network to carry their calls.

Virgin are not owned by T-M. T-M & Orange have a shared 2G network and afaik before Virgin were only using T-Ms side of the joined network - it's possible an update has been done to allow sharing on both sides but this is pure guess.
 
same with my desire on virgin, keep getting the R icon above the signal bar.
will I incur any additional data charges with the orange apn?
 
No - I highly suspect this is a network ID fault as your SIMs havn't been updated (trying to find more) but if you're paranoid go into wireless settings > mobile networks > select network and select it back to Virgin/T-M :) Haven't got a Virgin SIM to hand so not sure if the network shows up as Virgin or T-M in the manual selector but either will work as they have the same network ident - it's just your SIM which knows to put the word "Virgin" instead of T-M in the currently selected Network field.

BONUS EDIT: Turns out this went live (was previously in small subsite testing) either this week or last - everything is fine and you don't need to panic :)

BONUS EDIT #2: Seen the following after a few googles: If you want to opt into the switchover (I guess they mean switch over and recieve a SIM update so you don't panic as it appears you were already "switched") do the following. I'd suggest you do it personally but I would, I test for a living :) 99% sure the text is free. If you don't do this then eventually it will happen anyway, this just speeds it up. The restart it aludes to means this is just a SIM update - zero chance of a problem.

"Text Yes to 789777, you should receive a reply within 24 hours. just switch off and back on to update the phone after reading the reply."
 
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also done had the text saying that if I get no VM signal reboot to jump to orange
same happened when i was on orange with tmob but it was automatic I suppose it will be this way around as i already jump to roaming when il get low VM signal
 
You can now use the Orange network if you don't have Virgin Media coverage. Just turn your phone off and on again. For more info go to virginmedia.com/coverage

Any way to do it without restarting my phone?
 
Hmm, not the best of fixes but something free is better than nothing. If they have done it right going into airplane mode and out again should do the trick. They must have programmed it to have a priority order (T-M then Ora nauturally) but this process can only run when the radio is initialised when the radio talks to the SIM about available networks.

I would expect it would only go back to T-M on restart too unless they made some kind of crazy logic where you can join Orange only on startup but go back to T-M once in range. That's kinda half arsed though.

On the other side, EE customers have the same basic programming but it can run constantly. It's unlikely this will be the final solution - networks make money by having signal available so you can use their services so hopefully in a year this will be morphed into a proper always-on type fix.
 
dave_beast said:
Happened to my gf yesterday at uni on her Blackberry, she said it had swapped from Virgin to Orange.
Click to expand...

This will depend on the phone. Looking at internal docs it appears the vast majority (>95%) should autoswitch between Virgin and Orange correctly. There's a few older handsets where a restart (or flight mode toggle) will be needed.

If you're on Virgin I would HIGHLY suggest you look at their phone issues DB and check if your phone is in it / has any warnings. Nothing major, just be aware :)
http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/genericContent.do?contentId=mint.device.faqs.howdoi.sm659
 
Cleeecooo said:
You can now use the Orange network if you don't have Virgin Media coverage. Just turn your phone off and on again. For more info go to virginmedia.com/coverage

Any way to do it without restarting my phone?
Click to expand...

Could try going into aeroplane mode and back out if your phone has it.
 
I'll try airplane mod.

For some reason my internet doesn't work with Orange - this is in places I had excellent 3G connection in before :(
 
It would only be 2G on roaming with Orange (so this is GPRS or EDGE) but it should work as long as you have enabled data roaming.
 
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