Orange's attempt at fighting call cards

News just in from France Telecom's local subsidiary: it's introducing a "simple and low cost" way to call abroad. Is it lowering its international call rates? No! Don't be silly. It's putting out the Call Abroad pay-as-you-go SIM, which offers "the cheapest rates currently available for international calls". Only 8p a minute to my native South Africa? Huzzah.

Hang on - there is a cheaper alternative already. It's called VoIP, that new-fangled technology which Orange is doing its damnedest to discourage on its phones. But let's play along with Orange for now and pretend internet telephony doesn't exist.

The real enemy here, of course, is international call cards, which naughtily steal away Orange's revenue by offering low-cost calls via an 0207 number or somesuch. "Orange research shows that people currently find making international calls confusing due to misleading price structures and the lack of transparency around calling cards," warns Orange, but how is it making things simpler for the customer by offering a separate SIM for making international calls? A quick call to the Orange press office, asking whether it might not be more user-friendly to, y'know, just lower the standard international calling rates, elicited this response:

"We could do that, but the rates wouldn’t be as good as they are. The only way we know is to make a separate SIM at the moment, because we couldn’t physically put it onto our standard pay-as-you-go tariff from launch."

Not physically possible? Eh? But wait: "It might be in the future that we just offer one SIM for our standard UK calls and new [international] rates".

Nope, me neither.

Anyway, who's the target market for these new wonder-SIMs? According to Pippa Dunn, Orange's pay-as-you-go manager, it's visitors to the country and the "approximately 5.5 million ethnic British nationals living in the UK". There are only 5.5m people of British ancestry living in the UK? Out of 60m inhabitants? Blimey. Perhaps that's not quite what she meant...

UPDATE: Just been rung by the Orange press office to point out that 5.5m is the number of people from "ethnic minorities" who are "looking for an affordable and convenient way to phone home" (according to their research), not the number of such people who are living in the UK. Which still misses my point (see above), but there you go - happy to set the record straight.