Would you like a laptop with that?
The marketeers efforts to capture the 40% of households that don’t have broadband continue, using the lure of a "free" (ie inclusive) laptop tied in with a very long contract term on 3G mobile broadband (or in some cases fixed line broadband). This is fairly clever in that someone without a computer can be provided with one and with broadband for a relatively modest monthly figure, helping bridge the "digital divide".
Recent offers from Orange (Asus EeePC 900), T-mobile (Acer TravelMate 5320) and Three (HP) are likely to be followed soon by Vodafone.
At around £30/month over 24 months the minimum outlay of £720 is not small, but as credit is tight it may be reasonable value for money. The premium over fixed line broadband plus a phone line is at least £10/month or £240 over the contract period so the laptop costs are being covered.
Availability and performance of 3G broadband may however be a problem, YouGov recently reported a "DongleTrack" survey where 11% of users were planning to drop the mobile broadband in favour of using their home ISP and a further 18% were undecided. On the other side of the coin 13% of mobile broadband users chose the technology because they didn’t have access to a landline.
T-mobile’s tariff works on a "Fair use" basis without any charges, but Orange and Three both have fairly stiff charges once you exceed the bundled allowance - £15 and £100 per GB respectively.
While these services are good for travelling around, we aren’t convinced the bandwidth is present in the network to allow serious use on a large scale replacing landlines. The per GB charges and low (3 or 5 GB/month) allowances indicate the scarcity of bandwidth and cost of providing more, so as usual it’s "caveat emptor" or buyer beware - make sure you can actually get a 3G signal where you need it, and try out someone else’s system for speed, ping times and general responsiveness before buying.
