Orange leaves BT with the bitter taste of defeat

NEWS Orange UK is claiming 830,000 new customers for the second quarter of the year, pushing it into second place behind Vodafone. This brings its total to 11.9 million, up from the second quarter of 2000 and puts it ahead of arch-rival BTCellnet which has 11.6 million customers. These figures exclude one million subscribers estimated to be inactive users. Although the vast majority of users - 73 per cent - are still 'pay-as-you-go' customers, this percentage is down from 93 per cent for the second quarter of 2000.