The big thing at the moment that all of the mobile phone companies are pushing is mobile broadband.
If you don't know what this is and how it works, it consists of a USB dongle that contains a mobile broadband modem and a sim card. The device connects to the mobile networks that 3G mobile phones use and provides quite a fast broadband connection equivelent to 1.5Mbit - 3Mbit in speed if you are in a 3G area, or if you are outside one of these areas it will drop down to using the older EDGE networks which will be slower, but still fast enough to access email and browsing.
To get mobile broadband you just sign up to one of the mobile phone companies mobile broadband packages, receive your usb dongle, and once activated you can just connected it up to any computer by plugging it into a USB port and you will be connected and online. Very simple and very easy. And quite fast speeds anywhere you are. And none of the complicated sometimes flaky Wi-Fi setup hassles.
How much does it cost? As with mobile phones you have the option to go for a monthly contract, or pay as you go. If you opt for Pay as you Go then again as with mobile phones you have to purchase the USB dongle and then pay for your bandwidth usage as you go. The dongles cost about £30-50 depending on where you look.
If instead you go for a monthly plan the prices start at £10 a month and you get a free dongle. This is normally for 1GB data allowance, which while not sounding like much is OK for general internet browsing and email. If you start watching lots of streaming videos you are going to use it up quickly though.
They do offer larger bandwidth packages such as 3GB for £15 or 7GB for £25 per month.
And at the moment 3 are doing quite a good deal. If you are an existing 3 mobile phone user then you can get their mobile broadband at 50% off, so the basic 1GB bandwidth package only cost £5 at the moment, and the larger 7GB one just £12.50. And they are stating that as long as you also have another mobile phone contract this price will be the same for life. You can read more
here.
For the other networks, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone are also all doing them. The prices start higher than 3's £10 package, but they don't offer the same 1GB package. Instead they all have a £15 per month 3GB package which is the same price as 3's.
The only thing you do need to check is the extra datacharges if you go over your download cap. 3 charge 10p per MB, O2 charge 20p per MB, Orange charge just 1.46p per MB, and Vodafone could catch you out because as soon as you go over the cap you are charged £15 per GB, although this might work out cheaper than the other networks if you actually use an extra GB. This leaves T-Mobile which might be worth looking into more at the moment because even though they do have a cap like the others they don't currently have any extra datacharges for extra data use.
BigPockets also have a deal going for the 3 network mobile broadband, with a dongle for just £38.99, so if anyone is interested you can take a look
here.
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Why are they calling it a dongle? I always thought a dongle was just a a device which allowed you to use certain pieces of software, and not a posh name for a device which connects you to a network.
I did find this about mobile internet access quite interesting a few years ago, but it seemed alot more expensive then.
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It is only in the last few months that this new much cheaper mobile broadband service is now appearing at an affordable level. This style of mobile broadband is quite a new idea and it is slightly different to the older versions that were available. Before when using something like the mobile PCMCIA network cards with a sim card, you were basically using the mobile network as if you were connected via a WAP/2G phone. But this new version takes full advantage of the much faster 3G and 3.5G network infrastructure, with the big difference being that your connection is using a sim card and device designed purely for internet access and not a full mobile phone contract.
As for the term dongle. Originally that was right. A dongle was a hardware device that acted as a software key. We used to need them before software, mainly from Matrox, Discreet/Autodesk, and some Adobe software would work. 3DSMAX, After Effects Pro, Speed Razor, Discreet Edit and Combustion etc... all needed a hardware dongle to be present, connected to the parallel port or the software wouldn't run.
But the term Dongle has since become more generalised. It now refers to any type of device that connects to a port to allow something else to happen. Sort of the computer term for catalyst. So it could be used for any type of connector, converter, usb flash drive, wireless network adapter etc...
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I'm currently using 3pay "Dongle" i suppose they call it that cause it's bigger than a usb stick and if your crazy enough u can pay for a fancy sticker so called "Customization" lol
it cost me 49 quid and i stuck my first 10 quid on it! sadly it's just not enough for me i've almost used it all in 5 days!
Speed is ok most of the time apart from evenings 6 till 10 say! download speeds vary from 5k a second to around 100k a second it's not ideal but better than nothing at all (and putting up with shitty BT)
Internet without BT @ ****ing last!
I'm going to get a 15 quid voucher on Monday (3gb) hopefully that might last me 3/4 weeks then
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