General: Mobile Broadband

I popped into Currys the other day to fill some time and keep an eye on the marketplace. Instantly someone jumped on me to consider mobile internet, as part of the "free laptop" deal.

I'm a bit of a bastard when I pop into technology shops - I never let on that I'm a Journalist and I play as dumb as possible and probably ask way too many questions to find out if the people actually know what they are talking about or what lies they are trying to feed us. Things didn't quite add up to me - with their best deal being around £40 for 5GB of mobile broadband, and up to £500 to spend on a notebook. I didn't have time to compare mobile broadband prices, but I had a vague recollection of that broadband deal by itself being around the £15 mark (turns out I was right). So you're essentially paying an extra £25 a month over 24 months for a £500 notebook. Calculate that up, and you're not getting a free laptop at all! You're merely paying it off over an extended period.

This deal maybe stupid enough to sucker in an idiot - but I'm sure I'm not the only one to laugh it off and they are missing out on an opportunity. If you can guarantee a 24 month contract from someone (and that's minimum, most people continue their contracts because they are lazy...) why not give them a free laptop? Or at least a decent deal on one.

Personally, I've paid £5 a month as part of my three contract and I get 1GB a month with unlimited Skype use and push e-mail. If I'm using my mobile phone, this really is plenty - and I use Google Maps and Facebook a fair amount. But with bluetooth I connect it up to my EeePC and use this too and this is where I imagine I'd need the better details.

Three offer up to 50% on their high bandwidth packages (15GB) if you are an existing customer. But if you ignore this, realistically - it's an open market. You don't have to go with the same mobile broadband provider as your mobile phone provider. So if you are looking for mobile broadband deals, check out Broadband Expert, who sponsored this post

If you're on Linux, be wary that many modems are split-mode USB devices and come up as flash devices initially, and then become modems once initialised as such by the Windows drivers. I've had to fiddle with udev to get this working on my ZTE modem, but I've heard the newer Linux Kernel will support this natively - so here's hoping!

I'd love mobile broadband on my PDA. To upload pictures directly from compactflash card to my LAN, from - *wherever*. 2 problems, however:

1 - no-one does a 3G adapter for PDA's. And if they did, it'd fit into the CF slot...
2 - I'd eat through 10-15GB per shoot, not per month...

I could always get an Acer Aspire One, I suppose. Then I can delete the rubbish shots and only upload the decent stuff - but that negates the benefits of the idea, which is to dump the shots and get on with shooting, and go through the results at another time, or have someone at home check through them, dump the garbage for me, and photoshop a few shots for printing to hand to the person/people being shot at the end of the shoot...

Anyhow, I do think it's time mobile broadband started to get more competitive. An unlimited package - yes please. Even if it's limited to 512k...

For the top of the range, £3K+ cameras (EOS 1D Mk3 has one) you can buy an addon 802.11x card for £silly. But that only uploads photos to a local laptop, not to the Internet...

It's ok, I have another solution - I got me a 16GB CF card. Ok, there's no uploading and having someone on the Internet photoshop my pics while I take more, but that's a silly wishlist thing, not anything I actually need...