Save up to 63p with Orange!

I spent a ridiculous amount of time on our latest podcast telling everyone that I thought there would be essentially no difference in price when Orange announced its iPhone tariffs when compared to O2's. Such predictions can come back and bite you on the arse, but after a morning spend wrestling with Excel following the announcement at interest.orange.co.uk, I can say with confidence that, dammit, I was right. As my spreadsheet shows (download it from the foot of this post if you'd like to play with the figures yourself), when you take into account the monthly tariff and the cost of the handset on that tariff (the TCO – Total Cost of Ownership over the life of the contract) then there's not even a quid's difference in comparable tariffs between O2 and Orange on any tariff or for any handset. And that, remember, is over the 18 or 24 months of the contract.

So: by all means choose your iPhone provider because of loyalty, better network coverage or other deals, but don't, in this case, pick it by price.

(Oh, and tell me if you spot a mistake in my Excel methodology! One caveat: as @huskypup reminded us on Twitter, the rate of VAT goes back to 17.5% in January, but for the sake of our sanity, we're ignoring that. The general point, in any case – that the price differences are negligible – won't change.)