31 May 2005

Orange can confirm that the withdrawal of Wildfire, the voice activated answer phone service, has been postponed until 1st July 2005. This move comes in response to customer feedback and a desire to allow disabled customers sufficient time to take up additional support and advice on alternative products.

Specifically, we’re looking at ways of providing disabled customers with TALKS software which voice-activates the phone’s menu. Our intention would be to provide this software free of charge to disabled customers.

In addition, calls to Wildfire will be free from 1st June to 1st July to allow customers to record all their contacts without incurring charges.

When Wildfire launched five years ago, it was an innovative service offering Orange customers the opportunity to access voice messages. However, over the last eighteen months user numbers have declined rapidly and during a recent review of the service it became clear that Wildfire does not offer some key features that many Orange customers have come to expect from their answer phone service. As a result, it has now become financially and technically impractical to run the service.

All Orange customers who use Wildfire were contacted by letter to advise them that the service was being withdrawn and they’re now being contacted to advise them of the one month extension. Customers can call Orange on 158 if they are a business customer or 150 if they are a personal customer for further details.

Click here for questions and answers related to the withdrawal of Wildfire