France's Orange has admitted limiting 3G download speeds on its network.

The throttling was uncovered by iPhone 3G users, whose complaints about 3G speeds eventually led to a worldwide survey and discussion of the issue.

While those problems were likely be caused by faulty chipsets in the iPhone the resulting research revealed some strange 3G figures from Orange.

While customers complained to technical support the speed suddenly went up. It seems that the official policy was lock the speed at a low setting and hope that customers would not notice. If they did just give them the bandwidth they paid for.

Orange has now come clean and revealed that all 3G devices on its network are capped at download speeds of 384Kbps, roughly one-fifth the download speeds that T-Mobile users.

This is just 5%of HSDPA's theoretical maximum speed. Orange has promised that the cap will be 1Mbps by September 15. X

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