Orange LiveRadio

Orange has announced its LiveRadio – effectively an Orange branded Wi-Fi radio. You pair it up with your wireless router and away you go listening to internet radio from around the globe.
So far, so normal. You can buy a cheaper device elsewhere. But the Orange LiveRadio does allow you to purchase music from the Orange music store (I assume music that’s played on specific Orange music streams). And the inclusion of downloading podcasts to the radio is nice.
But £99.99 is too high. Seemingly Orange has sold 10,000 of these devices in France (where at 129 Euros at the current exchange rate, the price is actually slightly higher than it is in the UK!), so perhaps it’ll do well, but I think these things need to come down to less than fifty quid before they really hit the mainstream.
I do however note that very nearly the first thing you read on the LiveRadio purchase page is a note to say that the radio is unsuitable for people who have a 2 GB cap on their monthly downloads. And it further tells customers that they should switch off their radio when it’s not in use to prevent consumers contravening fair usage policies.
Who would have a 2 GB cap on their downloads? Well, if you’re on a free Orange broadband package, you might. Orange’s basic plan these days has a 6 GB cap on it, but that’s a paid-for plan. When they originally offered free broadband to their mobile customers, there was a 2 GB cap.
And I find it plainly bizarre that something using as little bandwidth as internet radio could leave me liable to contravene any ISP’s fair usage policies. I’m a heavy radio listener, and playing around with a 32k mp3 stream of Virgin Radio in Winamp, I can see that I’d be using 14 MB an hour. So listening at work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for a 4 week month would result in me using 2.2GB a month. And if I upped that to the 128k stream (8.9 GB a month on the same basis), I can see that I’d be in serious trouble if I was even on Orange broadband’s most basic paid-for service…


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