Mobile Internet Pay and Go Services
BillMonitor doesn’t support mobile broadband services yet, but they’re becoming very popular, so when a friend of mine asked me which was the best deal out there I thought I’d do my service to mankind and post a run-down of the pay as you go broadband services around.
Vodafone kick us off with a good deal if you’re looking for short term use: £39 for the USB modem, including one gigabyte of data. As soon as you want to use more than that, however, it gets pretty expensive, at £15 per gigabyte. Head over to the Vodafone site for more details.
Orange improve on that a little, with a £48.50 up-front cost for the modem followed by £19.57 for 3 gigabytes of usage. Orange operates on a 30 day contract, so if you don’t use your data in that time, it’s gone. If you’re a heavier user, £29.36 will get you 10 gigabytes for the 30 days. Check out the Orange site for more details.
Three round off the normal deals with a £48.93 modem and £10 for 1 gigabyte, again valid for 30 days. £15 will get you 3 gigabytes, and £25 gets you 7gb. Head over to Three’s site to buy.
t-Mobile and o2 take a different tactic – you can choose to buy an allowance for a day, a week, or a month, depending on how much you think you’ll use it. O2 will set you back £29.35 for the modem, and then £2 a day, £7.50 a week, or £15 for a month. Be warned if you’re high usage though – the allowances are extremely low compared to other networks, at 500 megabytes for the daily package, a gigabyte for the week, and 3 gigabytes if you opt for the monthly option. O2’s package is available here.
By contrast, T-Mobile have a huge 3 gigabyte per day fair usage policy on their packages, and will set you back £42.54 for the modem followed by £1.70 a day, or £8.51 a week, or £17.02 for 30 days. For both light and heavy users this is likely to be the best choice if you’re not willing to move up to a contract. T-Mobile’s mobile internet options can be found here.
Want to know about the contract options? Check back next week.
