Mobile broadband is on the march. Many people have already been won over by the promise of broadband that goes wherever they go, and - more importantly - doesn't require them to pay twice: once for the broadband and once for the phone line. So should you be preparing to join them?
In this feature, we'll examine whether mobile broadband, Naked DSL or ADSL - or a combination of the three possibilities - is the best option for various different types of lifestyle.
From light surfers to hard-core gamers to small businesses, we'll be delivering our verdict on which option makes the most sense for their particular needs.
We'll also be recommending specific broadband packages for each of the different lifestyle categories, based on our own tests and the feedback of 20,000 PC Authority readers from our recent Reliability and Service survey.
We've pushed mobile broadband to its very limits, to see just how far a 3G data connection will stretch in both the workplace and the home.
We'll also be examining what effect the various types of USB dongle have on connection speeds, examining how regional speeds compare to metropolitan maximums and testing newly released 3G routers to see if they deserve a place in your home or business.
Our speed tests of all of the Australian mobile broadband networks revealed that mobile broadband is really only a practical option in areas covered by a strong 3G network. In areas blessed with High Speed Download Packet Access (HSDPA) connections, actual throughput speeds greater than 6Mbits/sec are a genuine possibility. In areas that only have GPRS connections, you're looking at sub-1Mbit/sec speeds or much worse.
With regional Australia and New Zealand, the situation is worse - GPRS speeds may be all you can hope to attain. So, before committing to any mobile broadband network, check coverage maps on the network's website to ensure you're in a 3G area.
Better still, grab a mobile phone on the network you're planning to use and check it can get a 3G signal in any room you plan to use your broadband connection from, since signal strength can vary from building to building.
Light Surfers
Those who only use their home internet connection for a little light surfing and email are those who potentially have the most to gain from a move to mobile broadband. And we're not only talking about internet newbies here: there are probably plenty of IT professionals who are so sick of staring at a screen all day that they barely touch the internet when they arrive home.
Even in June 2008, there were a surprising 800,000 wireless broadband subscriptions - 14% of all internet accounts - according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and that was before mobile broadband had reached the mainstream market. How many of the remaining 85% were keeping their landline just to maintain a broadband connection?
With Telstra charging $25 a month for line rental - before you even get to the monthly broadband fee - the economics of mobile broadband are very attractive. "Some people are using mobile broadband so they could scrap the line rental," said Andrew Ferguson, editor of Thinkbroadband.com.
With networks such as 3 and Virgin offering mobile broadband from as little as $20 per month, it can actually represent a saving on the landline alone. "You almost get the broadband for free if you think of it that way," Ferguson adds.
Ferguson believes that mobile broadband suits a particular type of home user. "Those most likely to switch are people with a bit of light usage - people who are doing a bit of shopping, a bit of banking, and not much else."
Many people are put off mobile broadband by the relatively restrictive data caps. The limits on the cheaper plans are often 1GB or less, and for mobile broadband, unlike ADSL, uploads and downloads are counted toward your quota.
Yet, even those who consider themselves "heavy" internet users tend to overestimate the amount of data they actually need. The average internet user consumes 2-3GB of data a month, although Ferguson said that some ISPs believe that figure is climbing nearer to 10GB. Nonetheless, those who use a broadband connection only for web browsing and email will never come close to even 2GB.
Light internet users are also more likely to be single-PC households, which are better suited to mobile broadband than multiple PC setups, because you can plug the dongle into your PC and be up and running within a minute or two, without having to worry about how you're going to split the connection.
Best broadband deal?
If you can survive on a 1Gb ration a month and it isn't as restrictive as you might think - then 3's $15 per month Broadband Lite option offers great value.
For those outside metropolitan areas, 3 is considerably more expensive: consider Dodo's 1GB monthly plan, which is $18 per month on a two-year deal and uses Optus' network. In New Zealand, Whoosh's $29 1GB plan is the best deal, though coverage outside of metropolitan areas can be patchy.
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.
Gamers and Heavy Downloaders
It's easy to assume broadband simply won't be up to online gaming or downloading tons of music and video every month, but is that actually the case?
After all, those on ADSL, rather than ADSL 2+, usually have speeds slower than 2Mbits/sec, which is slower than the actual speed you can expect to receive from the best-performing mobile broadband if you live in an HSDPA area.
And even in the past six months, the data caps on the most expensive mobile broadband plans are creeping up towards ADSL line levels, meaning it isn't necessarily going to cramp your style on iTunes or peer-to-peer downloads. So we decided to test just how far you could push a mobile broadband connection.
Online gaming
The crucial metric for online gamers isn't necessarily the raw speed of the connection, but the ping rate - the time it takes packets of data to travel from your computer to the game's servers.
Fast connections are normally blessed with faster ping rates, but it's perfectly possible to have a smooth online gaming experience on a connection as slow as 512Kbits/sec, as long as the ping rate is nippy enough.
A strong ADSL connection will probably offer a ping rate of between 20 and 50ms; most of the mobile broadband connections we've tested have ping rates in the region of 100 to 300ms.
Hard-core gamers will at this point be rolling on the floor laughing at the prospect of playing 3D shooters at such ping rates, knowing full well that they'll have a bullet through their brain before they've even spawned. But we discovered you can actually play games with mobile broadband.
We tested our mobile broadband dongles with the free 3D car racing game TrackMania Nations (www.trackmania.com). The game was perfectly playable with the Huawei 169G dongle running on 3's HSDPA connection: although other cars did appear a little jerky at times, especially when there were several cars onscreen, we could still race at full throttle.
The game was even playable using an older-style modem running on the slower Virgin network, although rival cars did occasionally fall out of the sky in front of you, as the mobile broadband struggled to keep pace with the server.
So we decided to up the ante and see if 3's dongle could cope with the heavy-duty demands of Call of Duty 4. It was up to the job during a lunchtime gaming session, where we roamed around the Bloc map with little noticeable lag and were able to dodge and react to opponents raining bullets down upon us.
By late afternoon, with the servers starting to fill up with more and more players, we found it hard to even gain admission to the maps. Attempts to join deathmatches were frequently met with a "server is for low ping players only" message.
Clearly, hard-core gamers shouldn't be ripping out their ADSL routers in favour of mobile dongles just yet. But if you wanted a quick ten-minute gaming session while waiting for the train, the mobile dongles might well provide some light relief. Just keep an eye on the data: our Call of Duty 4 session was chomping through about 2MB of data a minute, which could be a problem for those on low data caps.
Of course, many people prefer games consoles to PC gaming, but although the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sport USB ports, there are no suitable drivers or means of installing the devices on the consoles. However, it's possible to plug a dongle into your PC as normal and share the internet connection with the console, as obile Computer website have proven with the Xbox 360.
One potential stumbling block is that different mobile broadband providers use different Network Address Translation (NAT) settings, which can affect your ability to host and join games on Xbox Live. Vodafone and 3 place no restrictions on their NAT settings.
Many of the readers who followed Mobile Computer's advice are happily Xboxing away over mobile broadband, but it's undeniably a far greater hassle than connecting a standard router to an ADSL line.
Downloads & streaming
The biggest monthly data cap on the market, aside from Telstra's exhorbitant 10GB plan for $130 per month, is 7GB, costing $50 per month on a 24-month contract with 3. There's no doubt prices will tumble as competition hots up.
Even relatively heavy downloaders would do well to eat their way through 7GB per month. With 7GB you could download 10 hour-long shows from the iTunes store (about 450MB each), 100 MP3 tracks (around 5MB each), and a heavyweight software application such as Photoshop CS4 Extended (855MB) and still have more than half of your monthly allowance left to spare.
Streaming audio and video is also well within the capabilities of mobile broadband in areas with good 3G reception. Even the "high-quality" streams on YouTube are ready to play after a couple of seconds of caching.
Nonetheless, it's simply impossible to argue that download fiends wouldn't be better off with a standard ADSL or cable connection. Not only is it usually faster, but you get far more data for your money. iiNet for example, offers "shaped" data, where any data over you monthly limit is at a much slower speed, on even its most basic ADSL packages, which cost as little as $30 per month.
Best Broadband deal:
Internode and iiNet - which did well in the 2008 PC Authority Reliability and Service survey - offer high-speed ADSL2+ connections that gamers and downloaders will benefit from, with speeds of up to 24Mbits/sec download and 2Mbit/sec upload and 20Gb or more of downloads, from $70 per month. For anyone without ADSL2+ coverage, Optus' cable network is also worth considering.
New Zealand gamers should look at Orcon's Pro 15GB, which has high-speed upload and download, for $60 per month.
Students
A broadband connection is as vital to the modern student as the right textbooks and a bottle opener. Yet setting up an ADSL connection in student accommodation can prove to be hugely problematic.
For university students, the problem isn't so much the cost of getting an ADSL connection as getting any connection at all. First, there's the issue of the phone line: with mobile phones so prevalent, many student houses have done away with a landline altogether.
If there's no active line running into the house, Telstra will charge $59 just to switch it back on (up to $299 if you need a technician and other work). But the dealbreaker is that many telecoms companies demand that new account holders sign up for a minimum of a year - which isn't much use in student share houses, where people often stay for only nine months at a time.
Even if the phone line is already up and running, most ADSL providers will also demand that users sign up for a minimum term of one year. This is especially true of the low-cost or even "free" broadband bundle deals, where 18-month contracts are common.
Even those ISPs that claim to offer month-by-month contracts can impose costly setup fees, not to mention cancellation or equipment fees if the account is cancelled within the first year. Check the terms of any contract scrupulously before signing up. An honourable exception is Netspace, who rated well in our Reliability and Service survey - it offers rolling monthly contracts with a one-off $199 setup fee.
Mobile broadband is a far more flexible option for students. While the best deals are still found on lengthy contracts, students can obviously take their mobile dongle with them as they move between halls of residence, student houses and home again during the summer.
It also means you can take a laptop on campus and know you'll always have access to a broadband connection, without having to find a gap in the computer room or a Wi-Fi hotspot. Better still, there's no line rental to pay, and with mobile broadband deals starting from $15 a month (albeit with tight-fitting 1GB data caps), it means more of the money can go on beer rather than broadband.
The only potential pitfall is 3G coverage. Most universities in Australia are fortunately close to 3G coverage, but while students at the University of Sydney, RMIT and other major inner-city campuses will probably be bathed in HSDPA coverage, students at the University of New England or James Cook University might well struggle.
The coverage maps provided by the networks are so broad brushstroke that it's almost impossible to tell what kind of connection you'll receive until you actually arrive at your location. Even our office in Sydney can struggle to get a decent 3G connection on some networks, let alone a unit in Armidale.
Before committing to a mobile broadband contract, it would be a good idea to check the signal strength of your chosen network on your mobile (or a friend's) to get a fair indication of the connection you can expect at both your accommodation and university campus.
Businesses
For many self-employed professionals or small businesses, the dilemma isn't whether to plump for ADSL or mobile broadband, but whether they can afford to do without either. It would be enormously brave for any business - especially an internet-facing one - to entrust their sole internet connection to 3G. But it's the perfect complement to ADSL for businesses that routinely have people working from home or out of the office.
"Previously, travellers had a [Wi-Fi] hotspot subscription," said Andrew Ferguson, editor of Thinkbroadband.com. "Now it's a case of you [...] go online wherever you need to."
While today's smartphones are more than capable of handling remote email, Ferguson argues that mobile broadband has made it far easier to run other business-critical apps on the road. "If you've got corporate applications - software that's running across a VPN - then you're going to be looking more towards mobile broadband," he said.
Many mobile broadband services will allow you to access your company's VPN, and some come with a VPN client. However, check whether your particular network and price plan are VPN-compatible before buying: Vodafone, for example, doesn't permit VPN access on its plans. A dedicated business mobile broadband option, such as Telstra's range, is a good way to ensure you'll get the options you need to do business on the road.
ISPs are now beginning to bundle mobile broadband services with fixed-line ADSL connections. Virgin Mobile, for example, provides Broadband-at-Home customers with 1GB of mobile broadband data each month - which might be acceptable for homeworkers, but isn't really an option for dedicated business lines.
The beauty of the self-installing mobile broadband dongles is that small businesses can pass them around the office. A small team of estate agents could share a single dongle, for example, so they could show clients particulars of potential houses while out on visits.
There's one potential pitfall to using the same dongle in multiple laptops, however: keeping track of your data usage. While the client software that comes with all the mobile dongles will count the total data downloaded over a month on that particular machine, most providers don't offer a way of keeping tabs on the amount of data downloaded over the connection as a whole.
An honourable exception is 3, which allows users to register with an online usage checker. On other networks, businesses will either need to keep a rough manual tally across all the different machines, or restrict the use of the dongle to a single laptop, if they want to avoid creeping over the cap.
"With some of them, if you go over the usage limit, you're going to start racking up the costs," warned Ferguson. Optus, for example, will charge customers 15c for every megabyte they creep over their cap, while Telstra issues a 10c penalty (25c on the lower data cap plans) for every megabyte over the mark - that's roughly $150 and $100 per extra gigabyte respectively. And they say the days of rip-off data charges are over.
Using your mobile broadband stick abroad can also be costly. Charges range from the reasonable to the downright outrageous.
Wi-Fi access
One easy way to avoid being stung on those excess data charges is to pick a mobile broadband provider that offers Wi-Fi access as part of the deal. Telstra used to offer bundles that included access to its hotspots at airports and other public locations, but no longer.
Optus, through a deal with Azure wireless, provides access to 450 hotspots around Australia with its Wireless Connect business deals. New Zealanders can use Telecom wireless hotspots if they have a Telecom mobile broadband plan. The networks often have roaming deals with foreign hotspot providers, which might help avoid those punitive foreign 3G rates.
If there's no Wi-Fi hotspot available, businesses can always create their own with the new mobile broadband routers. These highly-portable Wi-Fi routers are ideal for off-site meetings or visits to clients, where there's no guarantee that you'll have access to an internet connection.
You can plug in your dongle and share the 3G connection with colleagues, allowing you to download presentations on-site, check email or even access the corporate network via a VPN.
One little-known feature offered by most of the mobile broadband providers, which could be particularly useful for businesses, is SMS text messages. The client software that comes with the dongles allows you to send and receive messages from the computer. Some plans include a set amount of free text messages, but most charge per message sent.
Is there anything professionals can't do on 3G that they could on ADSL? VoIP services, such as Skype, are actively outlawed by some provider, such as New Zealand's Telecom, keen to protect their call revenues. Others such as 3 actively encourage customers to use VoIP. Again, check the terms and conditions rigorously if VoIP is critical to your business.
Image compression is another problem that could hamper professionals, particularly those in the creative or web design industries. Virtually all of the networks compress website image quality to preserve bandwidth and to maintain the impression of true ADSL-like speeds, though some allow it to be switched off.
While the blurry images probably won't affect the majority of business customers, photographers who need to check the quality of images, or website developers, will almost certainly want to see the maximum resolution, even if it takes a little longer to arrive.
Best broadband deal:
Optus offers mobile broadband and hotspot access for $60 per month for 6GB of data and 15c per MB excess data fee. If you bundle it with a phone or broadband deal, it's $50.
You can get less data, too - 2GB costs $40 per month, $30 if bundled. NZ's Telecom offers a $60 per month deal which includes 1GB data; if you sign up for 24 months, it will cost $50 per month, plus the cost of a T-Stick or Datacard at $312 (no contract) or $179 (24-month contract). Extra data, in 1GB blocks, cost just $10 more per month.
Upwardly Mobile future?
As we've established, mobile broadband is already a decent alternative to ADSL for light internet users and students, and the perfect complement to a fixed-line connection for businesses. But will it ever overtake ADSL and cable as the connection of choice for the mainstream home user and internet enthusiasts?
The 3G networks have made astonishing progress over the past few years, and there's every indication they'll continue to grow faster.
Telstra already has the world's fastest 3G on its NextG network, at 14.4MBits/sec - even though there are few devices that can yet take advantage of the blazing speed, and fewer still that make it truly affordable.
The next step for Telstra is Enhanced High Speed Packet Access (eHSPA), which will be rolled out across the Telstra mobile broadband network during 2009. From April, eHSPA will incrase the current maximum mobile broadband speeds of 14.4MBits/sec to 21Mbps.
Telstra says that eHSPA will not only offer faster speeds, but also improve network efficiency and offer increased capacity as demand for mobile broadband services grows. The new Telstra 21 modem is capable of 8MBits/sec download speeds.
Experts believe there's plenty more bandwidth to be found in HSPDA, too. John Cunliffe, a chief technology officer at Ericsson, thinks that 80Mbits/sec is possible with the right codes and modulation."
Then there are so-called 4G standards, such as Long Term Evolution. LTE has reached download speeds in excess of 150Mbits/sec under laboratory conditions, with an average speed just shy of 80Mbits/sec - enough to give the fastest type of fibre broadband connection a run for its money.
Conversely, there are fears that as 3G access continues to grow in popularity - on mobile phones, as well as dedicated broadband dongles - performance will start to suffer.
As with ADSL, 3G is a contended service: the more people use it, the less bandwidth there is to go around. "We're already starting to see people moan about it getting slower," noted Thinkbroadband's Andrew Ferguson. Will mobile broadband become a victim of its own success? We can only hope not.
What difference does the Dongle make?
It isn't only the speed of the network that determines how fast your connection will be - your choice of modem can also make a big difference.
The vast majority of the dongles supplied by the Australian networks comes from just one company - Huawei. 3 offers Huawei E180, E160or ZTE MF627 modems, and NZ Telecom is a 3 holdout, offering only the Sierra Wireless C597. Yet even the various Huawei models offer different levels of performance.
3, for example, provides the Huawei E160G and ZTE MF627 USB modems for free on many of its contracts, but charges customers $5 per month for the E180. The E180 is capable of a higher throughput rate than the E160 and 3 claims typical downlink rates would tend to be about 30-50% higher than with the E160.
Faced with the option of paying $5 extra each month for a 50% faster connection, many people would opt for the E180. However, our real-world tests found that the E160 outperformed the more expensive E180: the E160 was about 20% faster in our speed tests, racking up an average download speed of 2.3Mbits/sec compared with 1.9Mbits/sec on the E180.
However, a look at the specs of the various Huawei modems reveals why that $5 extra per month for the E180 is money well spent in the long-term. The E180 offers support for 7.2Mbits/sec HSDPA services, whereas the E160G is limited to 3.6Mbits/sec.
Networks should see speed increase over the next 12 to 18 months. Choose a modem with future-proofing in mind, and check whether you can upgrade your modem, and how much it would cost to do so, if the network improves.
The E169 is currently the only choice of modem available on Virgin Mobile broadband, Optus, Dodo and Vodafone use the E169 capable of 7.2Mbits/sec. iPrimus still uses an older style "hockey puck" E220 modem. Telstra's Turbo 7+ modem is a Sierra Compass 885 modem that supports up to 7.2Mbits/sec, while the older Turbo 7 Modem Stick (a ZTE MF636) supports 6Mbits/sec.
Hockey-puck dongles
The USB stick modems have only really burst on to the scene in the past year. Previously, the networks supplied "hockey-puck" style dongles that connected to the PC via a USB lead. Are these older modems slower than the USB sticks?
Yes, according to our tests. The E160 USB modem achieved an average download speed of 2.3Mbits/sec on the 3 network in our offices, compared with 1.5Mbits/sec on the older, external ZTE MF622 model. If you're still using one of the external models, you should consider an upgrade when your contract next expires. Likewise, if you're using a PCI data card.
Integrated modems
Many laptop and netbooks now come with integrated 3G modems, but how do these compare with the dedicated USB devices? In our tests of the Vodafone internet stick, compared with a Vodafone SIM in two different laptops, we found the USB modem had the slight edge.
However, our anecdotal evidence is that it's sometimes easier to get a connection in weak signal areas with an integrated modem, because the antennas are usually spread across the back of the screen on a laptop, as opposed to the limited surface area afforded by the USB modem.