Mobile Internet

Having recently moved house without a new place to go to, I am currently staying with relatives who don't have any internet connection. As this will be a temporary move before I find somewhere permanent, I didn't want to have their phone line broadband enabled and tie them into a broadband contact they wouldn't use once I leave and one i’ll have to pay for.
The only real option was to use mobile internet or use the neighbors open wireless connection!

I decided on the mobile internet option. There are many mobile suppliers offering a variety of features.  The main features they present you with are price, connection speed, monthly download limit, contract term and setup costs.

I placed them in order of importance for my needs as follows:

1. Price - I wanted a reasonable price.
2. Contract term - I didn’t want to be tied for a long period.
3. Set up cost - including dongle price
4. Monthly download limit - I don’t want to worry about how much data I can transfer
5. Connection Speed - My expectation are it will be slower than standard broadband. - I intend to use it for surfing and accessing email.  I’m not going to use it for iPlayer or 4OD.

Using some of the many online comparison tools such as top-10-broadband and broadband-expert I went searching for what I required.  These are really good for getting an idea of what is available but it is worth checking out individual providers sites as some have better deals available. It is also worth checking with your current phone/internet provider to see if they can offer you something as part of a package with services you already use.

I narrowed my choices down to these three packages:

After reading up on them I opted to go for the one month contact package offered by 3 that included 5GB monthly download limit and a connection speed of up to 3.6Mbps for £15.00 per month plus an initial £9.99 for the dongle.  I checked that my area was covered by the service and place my order.

UPDATE - January 2010

I've now been using the 3 mobile dongle for several weeks and it has been fine.  Where I live i am getting a signal strength of around 60%.  The connection is a constant speed: I've not notice pages hanging or taking longer to load at the busy times of day. I've been able to send and receive emails including attachments as normal; watch Youtube videos and download TV programs to iPlayer at a reasonable speed.



For the first 3 weeks of using it, I used around 2.6GB of my download limit.  If I had watched my usual amount on BBC iPlayer and the other catch up services I would have exceeded my limit.

Overall the service is as good if not better than the fix broadband I had previously.  If there was no download limit I could happily continue using a mobile connection.