Everyday Surfers
The choice between mobile broadband and ADSL becomes markedly more complex when you come to "everyday users" - people with two or three PCs in the house, who upload photos to the web, download the odd television programme and perhaps dabble in a little online gaming.
Such typical family setups will generally involve a home network, with an ADSL or cable wireless router allowing PCs around the house to share the internet connection. On the face of it, replacing the ADSL router with a mobile broadband dongle looks like a compromise too far.
No teenager is going to sit patiently waiting for Dad to finish with the dongle on his work laptop, so they can update their Facebook profile on the home PC, and buying a dongle and separate connection for each PC is hardly economical.
That's why Vodafone, 3, Telstra and others offer mobile broadband routers (see page 26 for a review of 3's model). They essentially act as both wired and wireless docks for your USB dongle, allowing you to take the stick out on the road and slot it back in the router when you get home.
They boast many of the features you'd expect to find on conventional ADSL/cable routers, including WPA encryption, UPnP support for devices such as media streamers and even relatively sophisticated port and site blocking, if you want to prevent the kids from accessing certain sites or file sharing.
In our tests of the mobile broadband routers, we managed to surf the web at a decent clip on more than one computer, although performance suffered when we tried using an internet radio.
The speed of the connection can ebb away slightly over the wireless connection, and with even the best HSDPA connections only hitting top speeds just north of 2Mbits/sec, you'll probably find that splitting that connection between multiple PCs and other devices in the home delivers a poorer experience than a decent ADSL or cable connection.
That's not to say mobile broadband routers don't have their place in the home - they could be the perfect solution for those back bedrooms or granny flat, where the home ADSL router won't reach.
There are other good reasons why mobile broadband isn't quite ready to replace ADSL in the family home, however. The limited bandwidth and data caps aren't well suited to homes with multiple PCs, each of which could be trying to simultaneously download data in the background.
"You'll have all the antivirus updates coming through it, all the Windows updates coming through it - Windows XP SP3, for example, which is still doing the rounds," Ferguson points out. "The scale of the data [coming through in the background] is impossible to know. There's so much software out there doing 4-5MB downloads, which is usually fine, but 10c-25c for each excess megabyte quickly adds up.
Best broadband deal:
for a decent combination of download speed and no data cap, Internode's fixed-line Naked 10GB broadband package offers an up-to-24Mbits/sec connection for $64 per month. Regional and rural users might want to consider Internode's Explorer plan for $49 per month, or Westnet's Satellite broadband - 5GB for $75 per month, $68 if you bundle it with phone.
Telstra's mobile broadband 5GB ($90 per month) and 10GB ($130 per month) plan are shaped to 64kbps, helping you avoid penalty rates. Additionally, if you're willing to keep your landline or have a Telstra mobile phone, these cost just $45 and $65 respectively and you'll get a rebate on a modem or internet stick.
Alternatively, you could try Dodo's $60 8GB mobile broadband, which caps monthly costs at $99. For those in NZ, iHug's ADSL Broadband 3 plan offers unlimited downloads for $50 per month on a 7800/128KBits/sec connection.