3G Modem

When BT tried to ruin my life again, I started looking up all the possible ways to get online quickly and cheaply, without a long contract.

Traditional dial-up was one option, but I'd still have needed to wait for BT to re-activate the line there, and I'm not sure I could have coped with the speed. The price is also extortionate, and it's not the easiest service to get hold of.

There were a few other choices too, but I eventually settled on the seemingly 'too-good-to-be-true' offer of one of these new-fangled 3G modems.


_{Looks pretty sexy too}

The device is a USB Modem, as well as being a phone of sorts (you can send text messages to and from it, and it has a standard mobile number), and is capable of around 7MB connections - faster than my wired broadband at home.

The offer of £10 for 1 gigabyte of data on a 'pay as you go' scheme looked great - until you notice that the 'pay as you go' part is actually at £1/MB. If you want the £10/GB then you enter a 30-day contract - and lose any of the data you don't use within those 30 days.

We've got it shared across our home network now, and although there's a fairly alarming upload coming from the corporate stuff installed on my machine, it's all going along quite nicely. I even got the modem for just £50 on a special offer.

It's a good deal, but I'm not sure I'll ever use it enough to justify keeping the modem for myself. The freedom to connect anywhere would be nice, but £1/MB is extortionate and I'll never want to use it often enough to make the £10/1GB deal worthwhile.