Mobile Phones; Data Essential

Back in 2000 Mobile Phone Operators purchased licences to open up a whole new way to using our mobile phones. Seven years on, it doesn’t quite paint the picture that they had all hoped for, with 96% of us still remaining to use of our phones to text and talk.

Fortunately for operators and the people behind the purchase of the licences; one area that has taken off is that of internet access and have began to offer deals for our mobile phones which will entice us further into the third-generation of mobile technology.

From the start, mobile networks have offered data on a per MB basis. This meant that for every MB that is used; a charge of around £3 is applied to your account, dependent on the network, but all has started to change.

Orange; recently decided to launch cut-price deals which included free content. By offering a flat tariff, they hope to capture the market and like all other operators they hope to give better clarity for their customers.

T-Mobile; has managed to raise the most awareness of its data tariffs, namely “web‘n’walk” which, depending on the tariff, gives their customers the option to pay as little as £5 per month for unlimited internet usage on their mobile phones.

Vodafone; and their “Vodafone live” product has always been high profile in the market. Like other networks, they are expected be releasing an unlimited tariff soon, amongst their many mobile phone deals already on offer.

Three; are currently charging, as other networks are, £5 per month for unlimited access to the internet (subject to their fair use policy). If you only expect to generate a small amount of data charges per month then you can either pay £2.50 per month or not commit and pay £2 per MB used.

O2; currently only has bolt-on’s for their customers but as with the others, this is expected to change. For the same price as the unlimited internet on other tariffs, you are able to download 4MB of data.

If you use your mobile phone to simply access the internet and check your emails then these tariffs existing and future releases are for you. If it’s a combination of that and accessing the internet via your laptop then most networks are offering a more superior tariff which bolts onto your existing tariff and doesn’t carry as much restriction.