Thanks for that Charlie. Should have known better than to think The Inq could copy/paste accurately!

If Orange are so confident you need to opt in then it sounds more like a beta test... I'd want paying for that, not the other way round... I think I'll let other be the guinea pigs come Oct 5th!

You only had to cut and paste information from a press release and you failed at that... a more useful article on this matter is here:

http://www.mobiletoday.co.uk/Mobile_Exec/Customers_can_roam_across_Orange_and_T-Mobile_from_5_October.aspx

where it confirms Orange/T-Mobile roaming will be available from 5 Oct but is initially available only as an opt-in scheme, and it's certainly not yet available as you claim.

If Orange or T-Mobile customers want to opt-in to the roaming pilot scheme from 5 Oct, they can sign up here:

Orange Users: http://orange.co.uk/share

T-Mobile Users: http://t-mobile.co.uk/share

(Note that I have no association with either mobile operator, it's just that I'm on T-Mobile and get no signal in certain parts of the country so I'm quite eager to be able to roam on to Orange when I can!)

Went for a little walk down the road (yes, I was curious to see if Orange had managed a network "improvement" that didn't have a detrimental effect on my coverage as it did last time they "upgraded" my local cell).

Scanned for carriers, found T-Mobile, told it to manually connect to that...
*denied*

Normal service then Orange?

Has anyone managed to make their Orange phone use the other network?

A quick check on my Orange mobile, switching it to manual network selection, proved one thing at least... There *is* a network which gives me worse coverage in my house than Orange...