The merger of Orange and T-Mobile was some time ago and the intention is to continue to run them as seperate entities. None-the-less, there are advantages to the merger of some areas, and they’ve now announced that as of yesterday, users of either of their networks can now freely roam onto the other.

What does this mean? Well I signed up yesterday and it means that when the signal at home disappears for T-Mobile (and it does!) it roams to Orange, which has a much stronger presence in my area.

And all of this is free. Simply sign up at your networks site, provide your phone number and they’ll switch the facility on. You also have to tell them your phone make, as their may be some settings that require changing manually to allow roaming.

They’ll send you a text which you reply to – Orange responds back to this, although T-Mobile appears not to. And that’s it. It may be worth re-powering your phone as well.

Bear in mind that they haven’t got it running 100% smoothly yet so, for example, it won’t swap unnoticeable between the two.