Internet anywhere!

Posted on 19 May 2008 at 10:17

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Like regular broadband speeds, this is a theoretical maximum that's dependent on a lot of factors. Pretty obviously, your location and the strength of the signal you're getting will play a big part. This is especially important if you're thinking about getting a mobile tariff for use at home. Each network should be able to give you a good idea what reception will be like in your area: look at their websites for information on where there's 3G coverage. For extra reassurance, find a friend who has a 3G mobile phone on a network you're thinking about signing up with, and invite them round to see what their signal strength is like.

Although many parts of the national networks are now 3G-enabled, there are locations where you can get a mobile signal but not 3G. That means your modem will revert to GPRS, the old, slow data transfer system, which will give you speeds equivalent to old-fashioned dial-up Internet access.

Not all USB modems support the network's maximum speed, and you may have to pay extra to get a faster modem, as with Vodafone. In our opinion this is only worth the cost if you're going to be doing a lot of web browsing or regular file downloading. Finally, some network operators actually throttle the speed of data connections, so the speed you get won't be the maximum advertised. Our reviews and tables show you the theoretical maximum speeds that you can get from each account.

In practice, you're unlikely ever to hit the maximum, but there are so many variables that can affect bandwidth that it's impossible to quote an average download speed for each service. It's fair to say, though, that all of these accounts here are good enough for fast web browsing and email, and in everyday Internet tasks you won't notice much difference compared to your home broadband. But, based on our experiences connecting from various 3G modems in a variety of locations, we wouldn't ideally choose to use any of these services for regular transfers of very large files.

Cheap as chips

Mobile data hasn't traditionally been known for its good value. Those days are gone, and each of the four operators here offers a range of services for a reasonable monthly fee, starting from just £10.

The costs we've quoted are typically for new customers. If you've already got a phone with one of these operators, you may be able to get a better deal. For example, if you have a 3 mobile phone, you'll be hard pushed to get a better mobile broadband deal than theirs, as they offer half-price accounts to existing customers. If you can get the deal, it makes 3 the cheapest broadband provider by a long way.

Every mobile broadband account has some restrictions in its use. The primary figure is a download limit, set as the amount of gigabytes that you can download per month. Some home broadband accounts work this way too, but if you're used to an unlimited account, with only 'excessive use' restrictions to warn you not to download hundreds of gigabytes a day, you'll need to get used to watching your usage.

What happens when you exceed this limit differs wildly from service to service. Some operators will monitor how much you download, and when you exceed your limit they'll simply send you a warning. Repeatedly breaking the limit can either result in your service being throttled, so that you get slower downloads, or as a last resort completely cut off. Given that current network capacity makes some sort of limit inevitable, we think this seems a pretty fair approach.