Group Test - Mobile Broadband

Mobile broadband dongles have proved to be the biggest technology success of the year. We take a snapshot look at the performance and packages of each of the networks to see which one is best for business.

Introduction

There's no doubt that Mobile broadband is huge - if you seen any newspaper or have travelled on public transport anytime this year you can't fail to have spotted advertising for mobile broadband dongles where ever you go.

It’s the latest evolution in mobile computing. A few years ago Wi-Fi integrated into laptops revolutionised the way we worked. No longer did we have to be tied down to a networked PC to work and to communicate – your laptop could connect to the internet world via the magic of wireless.

The next stage was data cards, which meant that you didn't even need a Wi-Fi hotspot – you could get online and working anywhere there's a mobile phone signal.

The problem with these however, was that they were fiddly and required a laptop with a PC card. They were also expensive to buy, and the tariffs were very expensive, mostly limiting them to business users.

What really changed the game for mobile broadband though was the move to USB. No longer was mobile broadband tied to PC Card slots, they could be attached to pretty much any computer and that included desktop PCs and Macs.

Another advantage of going USB was that the drivers could be preinstalled on flash memory on the modem itself, and thanks to the wonders of plug and play, you could be up and running quickly and easily.

Furthermore, USB dongles are cheaper to manufacture than PC cards, a saving that can be passed on. But most significantly tariffs have come down to cut throat levels, with the networks falling over themselves to claw in market share. Chief of those was 3, who really set the low cost ball rolling when it launched a rock bottom £10 a month tariff, with a still usable 1GB cap. Only O2 has dragged its heels over releasing a dongle, only relatively recently coming to market and with deals only available to its own customers, a precedent it had already set with its fixed line offering.

Once O2 had come on board, we thought that the time was right to take each a dongle from each supplier and see how it performed in the real world.

How We Tested

A major issue facing the networks is that like the fixed line providers, they been censured for failing to live up to advertised speeds. Indeed some networks have been reporting the others to the Advertising Standards Authority for advertising misleading speeds, so we were keen to put that to the test with some real world testing of each network.

Vodafone and Orange claim to both offer 7.2Mb/sec coverage, 3 only quotes 2.8Mbps, while O2 and T-Mobile play it really safe with only 1.8Mb/s headline speeds.

Airports are obviously a key location for mobile broadband as there will always be hordes of business workers armed with laptops looking to get some work done as they wait for flights.

While Heathrow would be the default airport for the business traveller, Vodafone claims it has full coverage at Luton, which was the nearest airport to this reviewer, so that’s where we headed.

To test performance we conducted two different speeds tests. The first was from www.speedtest.net, which on a slick looking but flash heavy page lets you select from a range of server to conduct downloading and uploading speed tests. We chose Brussels rather than the recommended Maidenhead option as we found we got consistently higher results, presumably as less people hammer Belgium's internet connections that the those in the UK. To check consistency we also ran the speed test www.thinkbroadband.com, another popular UK site.