It’s been a while since T-Mobile and Orange merged, leading to the birth of new parent company Everything Everywhere (if indeed it’s possible to give birth to a parent) but until now, the point of it all has been slightly vague.

Finally though, Everything Everywhere (bit of an arrogant name but never mind) have spoken. And get this – if you are a customer of either T-Mobile or Orange, from October 5^th, you’ll be able to access the combined network of BOTH providers. Oh yes, we’re in the arena of big dreams here people.

Customers will need to sign up for the service, but it’ll mean that if they’re with Orange and the signal drops, their phone will search for a T-Mobile signal, reconnect if there is one and they’ll be able to carry on yammering away about bugger all for a bit longer.

Better still, from next year, the transition will be carried out mid-call with no need to reconnect and redial. Amazing stuff – although we’re not sure how often it’ll actually happen for callers. Cue floods of comments from irate customers of both companies who regularly lose reception.

Well it’s one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go cat go. Yes, we’re celebrating the life and death of Elvis in the Bitterwallet bunker today, mostly by eating cheeseburgers broiled in molten lard and subsequently passing out on the crapper. So we’ve hand-picked three deals that embody the qualities of the greatest King that ever ruled over the planet called Rock and Roll.

Not only did Elvis make girls moist in the lady garden, but he made their legs tremble and quake. So hooray for Steam selling the Quake Collection for just £4.24. You get Quake plus 2 mission packs,  Quake II plus 2 mission packs and Quake III Arena including Team Arena.

Elvis didn’t only like to sing – he also liked to whisper sweet nothings into the ear of his personal chef.

Relive the magic by ordering your wife to make you a fried peanut butter-banana toasted sandwich, by calling her on your new T-Mobile Pulse Android mobile – yours for just £109.99 with £10 top-up included and £5 cashback through Quidco.

Finally, if Elvis were still with us, we’re in no doubt whatsoever that he’d recommend you buy an 18 pack of Walkers Squares, French Fries, Quavers or Wotsits for just £1.68 at ASDA.

(deals found by HUKD members skipster3000, surahman and konkywonky)

It seems the marketing world has no bottom of the barrel left to scrape, having reached the point where it just can’t be arsed. Orange and T-Mobile announced they would merge several months ago, and now the new name for the combined company has been revealed. Please, you may want to sit down, or adopt some sort of braced stance.

As of 1 July, the new company will be called:

Everything Everywhere

Really, that’s it. And both Orange and T-Mobile will continue to operate as separate brands, too. According to the Guardian, Everything Everywhere plans to open around 100 retail outlets across the UK, and increase it WiFi hotspot network. The new company will also push ahead with launching broadband TV for Orange’s 850,000 residential customers.

Everything Everywhere – proving that in marketing, no idea is a bad idea.

Whisper it, but the HTC Desire is a bloody sensational phone. We had a play with one last week – it has a fast, agile interface, a brilliant display, and is lightening quick. If Google cared to market the Android Market so that mainstream consumers understood there was an alternative to the App Store, they might have something special on their hands.

O2 have just announced prices and tariffs for the handset, although delays in testing mean it won’t be available until mid-May. They’re really late to the game; the handset is already available through other networks, and Vodafone are offering the better deal:

On an 18 month contract, £30 gets you…

• A handset for £99 from O2, including 100 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data

On an 18 month contract, £35 gets you…

• A handset for £49 from O2, including 300 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data
• A handset for free from Vodafone, including 600 minutes (online deal), unlimited texts and data capped at 500MB

On a 24 month contract, £25 gets you…

• A handset for £99 from O2, including 100 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data
• A handset for £99 from Three, including 500 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data

On an 24 month contract, £30 gets you…

• A handset for £49 from O2, including 300 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data
• A handset for free from Vodafone, including 600 minutes (online deal), unlimited texts and data capped at 500MB

It takes a reasonable amount of effort to burn through 500MB a month, although if you’re constantly using data-intensive apps and opening mail attachments, it’s certainly not impossible. If you’re a light user of apps and mobile web, and if Vodafone’s coverage suits (and the chances are it will when compared to O2’s), then Vodafone seems like the a no-brainer. So what are O2 bringing to the party with the Desire?

Three’s website suggests their tariff includes a Spotify subscription, but there’s no confirmation other than the icon. Plus you’ll have to deal with Three’s dreadful customer services. T-Mobile are also offering the Desire from £35 per month for 24 months, with 1200 minutes, 500 texts and unlimited data. You can read more about the tariffs on offer from O2 here, and here for Vodafone.

A possible new logo for the combined companies

They’ve both tried to shaft their customers in the past year by changing their terms and conditions detrimentally, and now it seems that an Orange/T-Mobile superpower is just days away from birth.

The EU have given them authority to fast-track a merger which could happen as soon as this week, in spite of concerns from the OFT and Ofcom. The merger will give the depressing duo a huge 37% share of the UK mobile market, making them comfortably the biggest operator around.

But if you’re an Orange or T-Mobile customer, what do you think it will mean for you? More competitive pricing for handsets and tariffs? Less choice in the marketplace and therefore worse value for money. A larger customer base for the new company to handle leading to out-and-out chaos and a string of unbelieveable fuck ups? Or no change whatsoever?

And what the hell are they going to call the new company? T-Orange? Orangemobile? The Orange Mob? Surely it can only end in horrible tears…

As a special treat/cruel and unusual punishment, it’s True Or False New Year’s Eve, yet another chance for you to pit your wits against our tricky bargain-related statements that may or not be true or… false!

The bargains are from HotUKDeals and are all undoubtedly true. As for the accompanying factoids, you’ll never know… unless you look at the bottom of the post for the answer.

THE DEAL:  A one-year Merlin annual pass for a whole host of theme parks and attractions – only £75 but you must be able to collect it from London.

TRUE OR FALSE?  You can’t just collect this from anywhere in London, but from a specific location. In case you’re wondering, that location is Hedge 8 in Area B.

THE DEAL:  A box of 40 Duracell Plus high power alkaline batteries for only £12.79 – that’s less than 32p per battery.

TRUE OR FALSE?  If the power in the batteries sold in the UK in 2009 was harnessed, it would be sufficient to blast the country out of its foundations and send it circling Neptune eight times. Scientists don’t know what would happen after that.

THE DEAL:  T-Mobile 120 USB Pay As You Go dongle – just £8.49 delivered. Aggravating mobile broadband on the hoof.

TRUE OR FALSE?  You can’t use a dongle in the jungle.

(deals found by HUKD members L0oser, pedroman and whizzkid)

TRUE OR FALSE? All statements are… FALSE!

Because it’s the time of year for doing such things, we’re going to waste a small portion of everybody’s time over the next few days looking back at the ten most popular Bitterwallet stories to have graced your VDUs over the past year.

Today we give you numbers ten and nine – check back tomorrow for another couple and feel free to speculate about what shook the world of our readers the most in 2009.

10: How to enable internet tethering on a UK iPhone

In June, we passed on a hack that enabled users of jailbroken iPhones that were being used on a non-O2 network to enable internet tethering on their phones as well as allowing O2 users to dodge the sky-high tethering charge levied by O2 themselves. Wow – it seems like such a long time ago (pre-3GS) and we’re not even sure if it still works anymore. Anyone?

Only slightly more popular than… ‘How to write the word ‘boobless’ on your calculator.’

9: Want to cancel your T-Mobile contract? Here’s how to do it

Back in September, it looked as though T-Mobile customers had a rock solid case for cancelling their contracts after the phone giants ramped up their roaming charges by as much as 120%. Our legal eagles agreed, and we came up with this extensive guide showing T-Mobile customers how they could bail out of their agreement early and without penalty.

Many of you had a bash but found that T-Mobile were ready for you, stubbornly stonewalling your bids for freedom at every turn, refusing to yield and referring you to a complex series of appeal-shaped hoops that you would have to jump through before escaping from their clutches.

In our view, they were screwing their paying customers, but the whole thing proved that regulations are still stacked massively in favour of the mobile service providers. No doubt it’s an area that we’ll return to in 2010…

Only slightly more popular than… ‘How to modify Snakes on your Nokia so that they spill out of the top of your phone’

Orange and T-Mobile haven’t had an easy year and now some paper-pushing killjoys are attempting to ruin it completely. The proposed merger of the two telecom companies is being challenged by Consumer Focus and the Communications Consumer Panel (who they?) who suspect the deal will be fast-tracked without the impact on British consumers taken into account.

The parent companies of both Orange and T-Mobile (France Télécom and Deutsche Telekom) generate two thirds of their revenue outside the UK, so the merger is likely to be investigated by a European commission – that’ll occur far quicker than any review by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and Competition Commission. The mainland bureaucrats can choose to “repatriate” the investigation to the British authorities, which is what the consumer champs are hoping for.

Why stand in the way of the merger? Amongst the reasons, the Consumer Focus and the Communications Consumer Panel believe:

• reducing competition in the market will hamper the expansion of 3G network coverage
• smaller service operators will be lost (in the case of 3, we don’t think there’ll be many tears shed by Bitterwallet readers if that happened)
• the new company would control a particular part of the mobile phone spectrum, which could hinder the government’s rollout of broadband services across the UK
• the merger may affect virtual network operators such as Tesco Mobile and Virgin Mobile, who lease capacity from the service providers

From the point of view of Orange and T-Mobile, this is something that has to happen as far as their UK interests are concerned. T-Mobile is about as popular as a brass cloud and neither it or Orange will come close to challenging market leader O2 without merging with one another.

[The Guardian]

Right then – we’ve just got one more match-up in the second round of our Worst Company In Britain 2009 contest, and we thought we’d save this one till last as it’s got added spice about it.

For you to choose between, we give you two mobile service providers who have both shafted their paying customers over the past few months. There’s Orange, who shipped a huge amount of customers after we helped readers to get out of their contracts early thanks to the arrogance and incompetence of Orange themselves.

Then there’s T-Mobile – they pulled a similar trick when they increased their international roaming charges but when customers tried to get out of their contarcts, T-Mobile stuck their head in the sand and went ‘la la la la la la la’ until most of them went away.

So which of them do you regard as the enemy of the consumer? You’ve got until midnight to cast your vote. You can catch up with the outcome of Paypal v Vodafone from yesterday here, and while away some quality time checking out all of the results to date here.

The end is nigh – soon it will be time to choose the four companies who you’d like to see in the grand final….

Games and phones. That’s what it’s all about today. That’s what our bargain hunters at HotUKDeals have told us is erm, hot.

If you didn’t get Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 when it came out amid a furious price skirmish, then you missed out on a bargain as it quickly shot back up to a price of about £50.

Now a retailer has bitten the bullet and is banging the game out for a much-more-acceptable £29.99 on the Xbox 360. So what are you waiting for – tool yourself with some cash and get it before it gets you. Sorry, that last bit didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.

Sticking with games, there’s been a lot of rapid heat applied to a Nintendo Wii console deal over the past couple of hours. But this is no ordinary Wii – this is the evil black Wii that has just been launched. Black power!

At the kerrrazy price of just £149.99 you can get a black Wii, complete with a black Wii remote, black nunchuck, and copies of Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort. The games aren’t black but you can play them as black characters if you like.

Finally, a quick mobile phone deal that is on TODAY ONLY so you’d better pull your skates on if you want a piece of the action.

It’s 33% off all T-Mobile pay as you go phones. There’s also the possibility of some cashback through Quidco if you’re into that sort of thing. And who amongst us isn’t. Eh?

(deals found by HUKD members amibees, martinezst and bazza49)

Our quest continues to whittle away at some of Britain’s shabbiest companies before holding one aloft like a wet turd and roaring: “There. There it is. There is the Worst Company In Britain 2009.” But we need your help, or to be more precise, votes.

Today’s clash of the bastards has a mobile phone flavour to it. Locking horns in the ball pool of shite customer service are Carphone Warehouse and T-Mobile. After being pelted by your barrage of hate-votes, one will emerge unscathed and slightly embarrassed, while the other will be sent scuttling into round two, where it will face further abuse for its disgusting crimes.

Start now!

You can find out who won yesterday’s skirmish between Virgin Money and Barclays here and catch up on all the results so far here. You can see a picture of a large stuffed giraffe outside a Travelodge here.

So how many customers had their contract information sold off by a rogue T-Mobile employee to cold callers? According to the company, “hundreds of thousands” – T-Mobiles believes the details were traded for 15 months before they became aware of what was happening. But while the ICO prepares its case against the employee suspected of selling the data, there’s still no word about who paid big sums of money for the information.

We asked for your experiences of receiving cold calls from mobile companies seemingly uninvolved in your T-Mobile contract. Here’s what Bitterwallet reader John had to say:

“I’ve been getting pestered by these two outfits for the last three years between November and February, depending on when [these businesses] think my contract is up:

Free Upgrades (I think): 01132031377

New Logic Communications: 08450020012

Neither took any heed of my repeatedly asking them not to call so I just hang up on them now. When I challenged T-mobile about stopping the calls they blamed a third party, which was not possible as all my upgrades have been direct or their own stores.

Answering the calls from New Logic with “Hello New Logic Communications. I’m not interested in a Vodafone contract. Thank You.” was excellent fun. “How do you know who we are?”, “You’ve not heard my sales pitch yet?” and “F*ck off you tw*t” were some of my favourite replies from them.”

Obviously neither John nor ourselves are accusing either company of paying for private data, but since we’re what we laughingly refer to as a consumer blog, we’re keen to investigate any claims of cold calling. Let’s take Free Upgrades, for example. Companies House has no records of a company with that name, but the WHOIS information for freeupgrades.co.uk is publicly available, and together with the phone number places the business on a trading estate in Leeds.

The story takes an interesting turn when you look at their website. Free Upgrades is a single page with contact information for three service providers – no offers of upgrades, not even contact details for themselves. This hasn’t always been the case, however – Google cached the previous version of the page which shows it to have been an operational business with information and contact details. When did Google capture this page? Last Wednesday. For whatever reason, Free Upgrades have taken their website offline in the past seven days:

A Google Search for Free Upgrade’s number reveals dozens and dozens of complaints on WhoCallsMe.com, which provides forums to allow consumers to comment on cold calling. Some of the many comments on the site include:

T-Mobile said that they are a company called Free Upgrade. It is strange indeed that they are calling mostly T-mobile customers with contracts that are due to end. How did they get that info and do they stop when you sign up.

I am yet another T-Mobile customer with a soon to be renewed contract and received a call from this number. At first I didn’t listen carefully and assumed it was T-mobile calling… Eventually it dawned that this was not the case and when I queried this with him he became much less chatty and very pushy, the only way to stop him was to hang up. I phoned T-mobile customer services to ask whether they had authorised this call, they denied all knowledge and said they did not pass on any customer details.

Have just entered into the remaining days of my contract with T-Mobile and started getting these calls.

This number is calling me about once a day at the moment. I’m a t-mobile customer just coming up to contract renual.

Had numerous calls from these on my t-mobile contact number, which were silent when i answered, then i mainly rejectd them over 2-3 weeks. When i finally answered and got to speak to someone they knew i was due an upgrade passing theirselves off as t-mobile, surely illegal as they are not but a third party in Leeds?

I dont accept their calls, but they’re driving me nuts. I’ve noticed there seems to be a common denominator here, T-Mobile and the fact several people say their contracts are “soon up for renewal”.

If you read through every complaint in that thread, the majority of posters independently identify themselves as a T-Mobile customer approaching their date for contract renewal. The thread was started just over a year ago. The cached version of the Free Upgrades site provides a company number for Mistral Telecom Ltd, the parent company to Free Upgrades. Here’s another thread about a different number used by Mistral for cold calling, and again the commonality throughout is T-Mobile. It includes this comment:

I have just rung to gain info as to where they have obtained my number, to which they stated it was provided by T-Mobile. Strange because I work for T-Mobile (Senior Management Level) and we do not share any info with external companies, especially a competitor…

Another website that lists cold caller complaints also shows entries about another phone number belonging to Mistral Telecom, and when you search for that number in whocallsme.com, you won’t be surprised at what you discover.

Now, again we’ll point out that we are simply investigating a claim of cold calling presented to us by a T-Mobile customer, during which we’ve discovered claims by several dozen individual consumers that they received cold calls from a series of phone numbers operated by Free Upgrades and Mistral Telecom. Those making the claims over the past 13 months independently state they are current T-Mobile customers – no other service provider is ever mentioned – and many are reaching the end of their contract. All of this suggests some sort of business connection between T-Mobile and Mistral, since the latter may be considered to show a preference for customers of the former, yet many consumers have contacted T-Mobile to be categorically told they do not share customer information. We also note a trading website operated by Free Upgrades has been taken down within the past seven days.

Anything else to add? Oh yes, a small aside. Julia Forte lives in North Carolina and is the owner of whocallsme.com. Earlier this year, Mistral threatened to file a defamation action in the UK against Forte’s ISP – it’s a practise described by clpblog.org as “libel tourism” – the practice of bringing libel claims against US defendants in foreign courts, where the First Amendment and other provisions of US law that protect free speech (and in this case, Forte’s right to run the website) are not recognised.

According to the site, the service provider almost buckled until they were offered a pro bono defense against the action, at which point they challenged Mistral to enforce the action in the US. All seems to have gone quiet since then.

Although the comments of Bitterwallet readers suggest a far more widespread problem, T-Mobile has been forced to admit it is the mobile provider cited by the ICO as selling customer’s contract information to third parties. T-Mobile has stated that the members of staff involved had acted in the matter without their knowledge; the ICO is now preparing a prosecution against those responsible.

The big question that needs answering is – who has been buying your contract information?

In its press release, the ICO states that “many thousands” of customer’s account details had been sold “to several brokers and that substantial amounts of money have changed hands”. A middleman may mean the identity of the third party buyers remained unidentified, although how the data was used is made clear by the ICO:

“It is alleged that the information was being sold on to the service provider’s competitors whose agents were using the material to cold call customers prior to contract expiry dates to offer them an alternative contract.”

T-Mobile’s competitors obviously involve other service providers such as Orange (which is due to merge with T-Mobile), O2, Vodafone and Three, though it’s highly doubtful the major networks would risk the wrath of Ofcom by buying customer data. It seems more likely that the records were bought by one or more independent retailers.

As an aside, Bitterwallet reader Will points us to an email from T-Mobile sent in May, after he complained about cold calls when his contract was due for renewal. Will took his contract out through a third party, and T-Mobile lays the blame firmly at door of independent mobile companies for “passing customer information on… to other companies” (see the full email here):

So if you’ve received cold calls from a company other than your network or the independent retailer who supplied your contract, who were they? Let’s have some names, people. Not that we’re accusing them of paying T-Mobile staff for customer data – we’d just like you to recount your experiences of cold calling.

It’s not fair, dammit, it’s discrimination. While T-Mobile customers in this country have to put up with shoddy treatment over international roaming, in the US folks are getting free porn. Where’s the justice?

People logging in to view their bill on T-Mobile’s site have been suffering slack-jaws – and not because of the call charges. A feature called MobileLife highlights images taken by the customer, but it seems there are occasions when the images don’t belong to the individual:

Page 3-style titillation is one thing, but after the Consumerist asked if anybody had further examples, things got a lot, lot worse (the images have been censored by the Consumerist for safe viewing, although you may still be sick in your own mouth):

Now imagine the worst possible scenario in which porn could be discovered on your phone, and…:

“I have a company supplied T-Mobile blackberry. Very unfortunately, when my phone wasn’t working, one of the women in our IT department went to my T-Mobile account page to correct the issue and found a very graphic and clear picture of a woman’s breasts. It created a terrible situation. No one – and I mean NO ONE – would believe me when I told them that I did not take the photo, nor did I put it there. I finally had to just drop it because the more I insisted that it wasn’t mine, the more guilty I sounded. The problem here is that I am the head of the Human Resources Department. I wish it had turned out to be a funny situation, but it didn’t take that path. For many other people, this could be humorous. In my situation, it wasn’t.”

And in an entirely unsurprising development, T-Mobile stated the matter was nothing to do with them whatsoever and they weren’t at fault, claiming customers had left their handset unattended and somebody else had uploaded the photos, or that somebody previously owned the same mobile number and they’d taken the photos – the story changed depending on how impossible the previous excuse was proven to be.

[Consumerist]

Lies and intimidation are hardly the proper way to go about business, but that hasn’t stopped T-Mobile trying to prevent customers complaining about increases in call charges. Bitterwallet has proof that consumers were deliberately misinformed by T-Mobile staff concerning their right to independent arbitration by the Ofcom-approved adjudicators, CISAS.

T-Mobile recently increased the cost of international roaming for all customers, and have maintained from the beginning that roaming is an “additional service” and as such excluded from the clauses allowing a customer to cancel their agreement without penalty. We proved that the charges are an inclusive part of a customer’s agreement, and earlier this week Ofcom confirmed to Bitterwallet that “if the increased roaming charges are genuinely of material detriment to a consumer then under General Condition 9.3, T-Mobile should inform the Consumer of the ability to terminate the contract without penalty.”

From your comments and emails we hadn’t seen any evidence of this occurring, so we suggested how you could move your complaint forward. In situations where customers cannot resolve their complaint with T-Mobile, service providers are required to inform customers of their option to independent resolution through CISAS, an Ofcom-approved arbitration process. Except that wasn’t quite what was happening.

Customer correspondence sent by T-Mobile has been passed on to Bitterwallet, confirming attempts by T-Mobile to coerce the customer into not complaining to CISAS by:

• stating that other customers had already contacted CISAS about the increases in roaming charges, and that CISAS ruled in favour of T-Mobile 100 per cent of the time

• telling customers that any decision by CISAS was final, and as such any complaint could not then be contested in court

• in further conversations with two individual members of T-Mobile’s Complaints Investigations team, a customer was told that T-Moble had consulted with CISAS about the changes before they were announced

To summarise – T-Mobile told customers they had no chance of winning by going to CISAS, that they’d lose any right to take T-Mobile to court by going to CISAS, and that CISAS had rubber-stamped the changes anyway. The first statement is intimidation; we don’t think that’s what a service provider should be saying when looking to resolve a complaint through independent arbitration. The second statement is intimidation and a lie, since the CISAS website states “if you reject the decision, the company do not need to keep to it – you will still be able to take your complaint to court”. And CISAS are very clear that their role is to provide arbitration for resolving complaints independent of either party; not only would any prior consultation or agreement between the two contradict the role of CISAS as an independent adjudicator, but it would step well outside the remit agreed with Ofcom.

As an aside, one email from T-Mobile also stated that:

“I have also spoken with our legal department in relation to your previous email. They have confirmed OFCOM have advised that the forum you got the information from has misquoted OFCOM and they are looking at bitterwallet.com in relation to this.”

It was the first we’d heard of it so we contacted Ofcom about misquoting them, as well as the other statements T-Mobile made concerning CISAS. Ofcom have now told us that they contacted T-Mobile this morning to discuss our findings, and as a result have advised management that the statements made by their staff were not true, were not to be expected in these situations, and should not be repeated in the future.

As an aside, another email from T-Mobile has defined their interpretation of “material detriment” as the increased charges being likely to cause a 10 per cent increase in a customer’s overall payment. Our opinion would be that this should be contested by customers with CISAS. By including line rental, bolt-ons and VAT in the calculation, T-Mobile are making any increase appear less detrimental, since it will be a smaller percentage of the total. However, the changes in roaming charges are universal and so unaffected by a customer’s line rental plan or other additional costs. The point of material detriment is whether the increases will cause your call charges to increase, so as we pointed out, this calculation should be based on call charges alone, not the overall bill.