On paper, mobile broadband is bonkers. It offers better connection speeds than many landlines, lets you connect wherever you like, and if you choose the right deal, you’ll even get a free laptop. All with monthly charges as low as £20.
So what’s the catch? These laptops have to be underpowered, right? And what about usage caps? Mobile broadband can’t be truly unlimited, can it?
Actually, mobile broadband is as good as it sounds. Speeds now approach 8 megabits per second, and while you’ll need a good signal to get the best performance, that’s becoming less of an issue as 3G coverage expands.
Meanwhile, usage caps, while still in place, are more generous than ever. Limits for mid-priced plans now hover around the 7GB per month mark, which will be hard to reach using the web and e-mail alone. More pricey plans offer limits of 15GB per month. That’s enough to download over 20 full-length movies.
That just leaves the laptops bundled free from all the major networks. And there’s more good news: even the cheapest deals, offering mobile broadband and a laptop for £20 a month, come bundled with decent computers.
Take the Advent 2411, which comes packaged with Vodafone’s £20 deals. Inside its tiny shell is Intel’s newest Atom 1.6Ghz processor, 80GB of hard disk storage and 1GB of memory. There’s even a webcam built in, Windows XP as standard, and Bluetooth.
Bought on its own the Advent 2411 would set you back £280, so even if you swapped the £20 plan for a £10 version, and bought the laptop separately, you’d still be £40 worse off than by choosing Vodafone’s bundle, which totals £480 over 24 months.
Even better, pricier broadband offers come bundled with even better-specced laptops for free. This deal from 3 costs £35 per month, but includes a Toshiba Equium A300 laptop worth £450.
These aren’t budget laptops. They’re decent computers, with enough power to keep them capable for the next two years, so they’ll easily out-live the life of a mobile broadband contract.
Put simply, buying a laptop alone just isn’t an option any more. For the best value, it has to come as part of a mobile broadband bundle.
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