Nexus One and Orange UK pay as you go

I am currently in the UK. Last time I was here I bought an Orange UK pay as you go card.

First off, the deal with Orange is pretty good if you are an occasional visitor here. I can get 250MB of data for £5.00. In fact, if I'd subscribed to Dolphin as my Orange animal I'd get this for free with a £10.00 top up each month.

However, when I put the SIM card in the phone I got no data connection. The display just showed the signal strength indicator with no 3G, G or E indicator.

Initially, I assumed this was due to incompatibilities with the frequencies that Orange uses and those my handset can use. I have the version that works on the Rogers network in Canada. See this article for more information on that.

However, when I put my Rogers SIM in the phone, selected Orange as the network and turned on data I got a GPRS connection.

So it seemed the problem was something to do with the Orange SIM card. A long support call didn't provide any solutions, just lots of frustration. The Nexus One wasn't on their list of phones and the support person hadn't heard of it, so I was pretty much on my own.

Today, I made it into an Orange shop. Initially, things weren't going much better, but just as I was about to give up the resident Android expert came to help.

He was excellent and explained I needed to configure an Access Point Name for the 3G and GPRS to work. Sure enough, once I went to:

Settings->Wireless & Networks -> Mobile Networks -> Access Point Names

and added an access point with Orange WEB as the name and orangeinternet as the APN, the phone got a full 3G connection.

So, I can confirm that the Nexus One, Rogers Canada version works fine on the Orange network.