Mobile Broadband from 3

I've recently moved house and wanted to watch my outgoings for a while until everything settled down. I knew that I couldn't live without the internet but unfortunately the only provider in my area is BT. So I phoned BT enquiring about a telephone line and t'internet. After being put on hold for ages it turned out that the phone line to my new house had been disconnected at the exchange and therefore BT would need to send a engineer out to reconnect it. The cost to do this is £125! I wasn't going to spend that much then to be tied into a 12 month contract paying £10.50 a month just for the phone line to then have to pay another £10 a month to get the internet.

£125 + (12x£10.50) + (12x£10) = way too much for basic broadband!

So I set out to explore other options and came across mobile broadband from 3 and the best thing is the modems have recently come down 50% and its available on pay as you go.

So off i trotted to the 3 store near me and purchased the USB modem, sim card and £10 credit all for £60. I figured it was worth a shot and if it was no good then i've only lost £60 and could probably recoup some of that money selling the stuff on eBay.

3's prices are fairly straight forward and at the time of writing are:

£10 = 1GB
£15 = 3GB
£25 = 7GB

All allowances run out after 30 days but if you go on holiday for a few weeks you don't have to pay for a service your not using.

Now, I sit infront of a computer all day at work with access to 50mbps lease lines so anything that I need to download gets done there, at home i'm a very light user of the internet, check my emails and a few forums / news sites. So the 1Gb package should do.

When you open the box you get, 1 USB modem, 1 USB extension lead, some instruction manuals and a SIM card. All you have to do then is simply insert the sim card into the USB modem and plug the modem into a free USB port on your PC. Its worth mentioning that the USB modem is only slightly bigger than a memory stick and therefore is extremely portable but on the downside could be easy to loose.

Ok, so the modems in the laptop now what. Well nothing really. All the drivers for XP and Vista are already on the USB modem and it automatically mounts and installs all the drivers and required software. If your using another OS such as Linux or lepoard for the MAC then you're going to have to hunt the drivers down off the net.

The whole installation process took less than 5 minutes, with the software fired up i was ready to click the connect button. On connection I was informed by Windows that I was connected at 3.6mbps. 3 claim that a theoretical maximum for a connection would be 2.8mpbs. According to 3's coverage map I'm in a turbo charged area with good reception - but my reception sucks. I can happily achieve speeds of 1mpbs which i'm happy with, like I said before I dont really download things and 1mpbs is good enough to play youtube and iplayer programmes.

Overall i'm pleased with what i have, ok its not the fastest but it does for me. I've not had to call support so cannot comment on them. I would recommend that anyone thinking of buying one of these checks the coverage map first and goes for a demonstration in a 3 store.