In studying and comparing pay as you go broadband plans and one of my favorite consumer choices websites Broadband Choices, an odd remembrance came to me. Vodafone, O2 and 3 all offer pay as you go mobile broadband on a per unit cost basis.
This means that you connect to the Internet at a rate of approximately 15 pounds per gigabyte of download. For light users this creates a savings of approximately 50%. For heavy personal and business mobile broadband users this represents the potential to pay triple the contract rate.
So what was this on remembrance? It was the early days of the Internet connection by means of dial up. In those days in the mid 1990s we accessed the Internet via now familiar portals such as AOL and Prodigy. In order to use the connections and graphic user interfaces of these portals one paid by the minute for time spent online. True growth of the Internet did not occur until AOL and other portals began to offer flat rate unlimited usage. In the United States all plans and options for mobile broadband include unlimited usage. For some reason UK suppliers refuse to give up these few pence of profit.
When one considers that mobile broadband coverage from many of the United Kingdom’s suppliers only approaches 80% availability in the UK, it becomes clear that England’s mobile broadband providers will need to lower prices and improve the service if they hope to compete with the convenience of ADSL.
Tags: mobile broadband, mobile broadband coverage, pay as you go mobile broadband
I cant see mobile broadband being a step backwards – surely it makes complete sense not to be tied to a contract? Equally with the current economic climate where deciding who to give your money to means a lot. Its actually very good of these companies to offer pay as you go mobile broadband as well as contract mobile broadband – Part of me wishes when I had taken out a contract, at the beginning of the whole surge towards Mobile broadband dongles and what now, that instead I had paid the money to own a dongle and top up according to my usage patterns which where pretty low….
http://fashioncontrast.com/contract-or-pay-as-you-go
I have wrote a follow up to your article here for your attn: http://bit.ly/1Z1YMc
Australia is quite a bit behind the UK. We still struggle with hard ware costs of over $100. UK telco are offering much better deals than what we are able to access.