Thursday 23 July 2009

How Do You Find A Good Pay-As-You-Go Mobile Broadband Tariff?

By Steve Johnston

It's definitely worth making the effort to compare mobile broadband tariffs when you're looking for the best pay-as-you-go mobile broadband package. There are some small but very important differences between the offers from each of the providers, and the right deal for you will depend on the way in which you plan to use your mobile broadband connection.

The term "tariff" refers to the amount that you pay for a certain amount of data transfer, over a certain amount of time. This isn't as complicated as it sounds and works in just the same way as a pay-as-you-go mobile phone tariff does, except that instead of paying for minutes of call time, you pay for gigabytes of data download and upload, to and from the internet.

To use mobile broadband, you need a USB dongle, which plugs into the side of your laptop, or desktop computer and provides access to the mobile network and your internet connection. With a pay-as-you-go deal, you'll have to buy this dongle to start with, and then top-up with credit to start using it. A dongle will usually cost around 20 - 30 as a one-off set-up cost.

The most complicated pay-as-you-go mobile broadband tariff is possibly that of 3 Mobile, who have three different tariffs, depending on the amount of credit that you purchase. Their best value tariff is 7GB of data for a 25 top-up, whilst their other top-up options are 15 for 3GB and 10 for a single gigabyte. Even the latter of these is reasonably priced when compared to the top-up tariffs of other providers.

3 are also currently offering two "starter kit" packages, where you buy the USB dongle and some start-up credit for a set cost. These can be good as gifts or for students heading off to university, as the credit lasts longer than the usual month allowed by 3 before top-ups expire. The cheaper of these has 3GB of data credit included, which lasts for 3 months before it expires.

You can also get a deal with the Dongle and 12GB of allowance for 97.86 where the data allowance last 12 months. When you compare mobile broadband tariffs this is a good one to think about if you want to make a one off payment and not worry about your data allowance expiring

You should also think about T-Mobile when you compare mobile broadband tariffs for pay-as-you-go deals. They have a very flexible top-up system, which will allow you to top up daily, weekly, or monthly at 2, 7, or 15. This is based on a fair usage limit of 3GB per month and is distributed pro-rata for the daily and weekly top-ups. The USB dongle cost is 24.46 at the time of writing, which is a one-off set-up cost and around about average at the moment.

Vodafone is a little more expensive at 15 per GB but the great thing about Vodafone is that there is no expiry limit on the download allowance so you can use your time on the internet as slowly as you like. The kind of people who only use the internet occasionally should consider Vodafone when they compare mobile broadband tariffs, as you can use the internet whenever you like without having to buy new download credit each month.

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