UPDATE: Orange has been kind enough to issue us with a statement explaining their reasons behind the AnyTime closure. This has been pasted at the bottom of our news item.

Orange has begun issuing its older unmetered dialup (AnyTime) ISP customers with letters warning of the services closure come December this year.

The notifications don't appear to give users much choice, offering an impressively cheap 2Mbps broadband ADSL connection for just £11.99 per month as compensation, which is £3 cheaper than the previous dialup package.

One of our readers, Nick, was kind enough to send us a rough scan of the original letter and we've re-printed it below (personal details removed, naturally):



Dialup customers will no doubt be frustrated with the move, which follows a recent e-mail deletion saga directed towards their pay-as-you-go dialup users (here). Naturally Nick wasn't pleased either, offering the following comment on our forum (here):


Typically customers often have important e-mail addresses with their ISP that they won’t want to risk losing and such users now have very little choice. It’s also surprising that Orange haven’t offered dialup users more broadband packages, with 2Mbps being somewhat outdated.

Sadly dialup has been a technology in decline for quite sometime and no doubt Orange's axe will only serve to hasten its exit.

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UPDATE - Statement from Orange: