Comments on: Can mobile broadband kill the landline?

By: Pay as you go broadband

Pay as you go broadband — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:23:42 +0000

Can mobile broadband kill the landline? At a simple level the answer has to be yes!

If you look at the statisitics for the number of UK consumer taking up pay as you go mobile broadband contracts then the growth is pretty convincing; a quick look at Google trends will show you a massive surge in ‘mobile broadband’ and ‘mobile broadband dongle’ type requests since 2008. Mobile broadband (coupled with free netbook deals) has led to a number of major UK high street stores running out of stock. It all points in the direction mobile broadband taking over from home broadband…..

But does it? It is unclear whether the UK broadband industry is growing its total client base or whether mobile broadband is canibalising the home broadband market.

I would predict that the high street is going to re-push mobile broadband this Xmas. You will again see a surge in sales of pay as you go mobile broadband dongles and ‘free’ laptops.

Is mobile broadband as good as home broadband? – No… The speed and monthly downloads are not yet comparable to home broadband.

In my opinion Mobile broadband is an add on – perfect for business users on the move or students avoiding the costs of a fixed BT-line. Hence, the high ratio of pay as you go sales versus contract sales.

By: Steven Hoober

Steven Hoober — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:14:42 +0000

Ever since remotely reasonable speeds were met, this has entirely been an economic decision. I knew someone who, over five years ago, used a mobile dongle on his desktop computer. He worked in a real estate cooperative of some sort that charged stupid prices for all additional services. So he was able to save a couple bucks off their terrible prices.

Clearly, when pricing drops (and consumers become more aware of what the dongles do) this will take off everywhere. If I only had one computer, I’d use my vzw aircard exclusively (but I have like half a dozen, and VoIP phone, hooked into the network at home).

I like to think the next big step might be making it not impossible to get on. Software is between totally stupid and unusable on every card I have seen. My ideal world would have bridges, so you plug into any ethernet port and get mobile wireless service. That’s clearly too commoditized for any operator, though.

By: Rob Allen

Rob Allen — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:14:11 +0000

Agreed, moble has come a long way. I have a 3 data provision on my phone , i get my hotmail gmail, workmail and workmail (dont ask ) delivered to my mobile device, I can also twitter and facebook and browse the web. ish.

The problem is I have 10 meg at home, I play games and my girlfriend is a designer and works a lot from home. So any high latency commection is out the window there.

I am worried that all this wireless will put us back into the stone ages for streaming HD video and playing games, then when all of ireland is wireless and contention for wavelength is worse than ever, we will be left out in the cold in the digital high tech cloud entertainment media fog comes to our door.

Again it will be the ODTR’s and the “government’s” fault .

F*****S

By: mbrett

mbrett — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:38:57 +0000

Not in the UK. It’s too expensive when compared with Landline broadband. Also the different mobile providers would have to team up for the provisioning of mobile coverage so that the only differentiation would be quality of service. We would have to loose the issue of dead spots with one provider yet good connection with another. If I went to mobile broadband I would want to know my connection would be stable.