This six month deal attracts many customers, especially students who are not certain about mobile broadband and not willing to sign a long deal as well. Here, the customers have to pay GBP 15 per month for 3GB for download allowance and an initial fee of GBP 29 for their dongle. Customers who exceed their usage above 3GB per month are charged an additional amount of GBP15 for 1 GB of data. According to the companies claim, a 3GB usage a month was ideal for the download of 200mp3 tracks and 100 short videos, apart from 2,000 emails and 100 hours of web browsing.

The speed available from the Vodafone’s network is up to 7.2Mbps that covers 80 per cent of the country, although major cities and airports are the only privileged spots currently experiencing the maximum speed of 7.2Mbps. The product director of the broadband website, Broadband Choices Michael Phillips, feels that this offer is reasonable as many users are not comfortable to go in for a long deal. According to him, it was also worth pondering over the fact that Vodafone’s pay as you go package comes with 1GB allowance for the same price of GBP 15. He also adds that a 3GB per month is highly economic as the customers can save aboutGBP135 per year.

The current sales trend of offering a free laptop with a 24 month mobile broadband service also has not hit the bull’s eye, as the majority of the customers were not happy with these contracts for their long term deals.

The YouGov survey, an independent one held amidst a group of 2083 respondents ranks T-Mobile’s service number one in six customer satisfaction parameters out of a total of thirteen. As a matter of fact, this result trails behind the nine out of thirteen thumbing feat achieved by the same ISP in the previous survey.

Apart from winning top marks for getting connected, T-Mobile also bagged the top honours for the mobile broadband network coverage category. Other categories topped by the Germany-based mobile broadband provider were billing, installation and ease of use. Finally, in the customer services category it was declared joint topper.

Even though, T-Mobile has put up a decent if not remarkable performance in this quarter as well, their trailing behind in the categories such as quality, upload and download speeds, value for money and daytime reliability might pose a few sleepless nights to the enthusiastic think-tank of the mobile broadband supplier.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile’s UK Internet and Entertainment head, Richard Warmsley has commented that they were aiming to provide their customers with total liberty to surf the internet, check emails and share images, as accessing internet from any spot was continuing to rise up their priority list.

As for the average download speeds of the internet service providers UK, the figure is around 3.6Mbps and there was not much substantial improvement in speeds during the last quarter. The average upload speed was measured at 0.379Mbps during the speedtests. This means, the top two providers are well ahead of the average speeds, both in upstream and downstream speed performance.

Both Sky broadband and Orange ISP provider came with slightly lower than average download speeds (3.163Mbps and 3.021Mbps respectively). It should be noted that Orange has recently shown much better performance both in terms of speeds and reliability thanks to the improvements made to its broadband networks.

Other providers who managed to find a place in the list of top ten fastest providers are as follows: Tiscali (2.71Mbps), TalkTalk (2.398Mbps), BT (2.388Mbps), PlusNet (2.230Mbps), AOL (2.009Mbps) and Eclipse (1.892Mbps).

Interestingly, Eclipse Internet, which has launched its 24Mb broadband products last month, has been placed in the last place for the dismal performance. As for the upload speeds, Orange, Sky, PlusNet, TalkTalk and Eclipse have managed to provide bandwidth ranging between 0.22Mbps and 0.4Mbps.

Ovum, which analysed the growth of top four mobile broadband service providers over the globe reports that 3 mobile broadband packages have received immense response from its customers all over the world as the company has transformed itself into a high quality broadband ISP instead of being just a media-centric, content-obsessed company.

Specifically terming the UK ISP launch of mobile products in the UK as a great success, the report also points out that the marketing strategies of 3 Mobile have been the driving force of this success achieved in a short period.

The research also shows that Orange home broadband offerings with its mobile broadband have also been successful after the France Telecom owned ISP has improved its networks to provide consistent speeds and reliable service.

In Western Europe, the mobile broadband service providers has been rapidly becoming supplementary or replacement for the traditional broadband services like ADSL or cable. The findings show that Telekom, a major provider in Austria has impacted the broadband market with its mobile broadband products.

With Eclipse business broadband packages, the customers can make 1000 minutes free calls to UK landlines and cheaper calls to mobiles (Eclipse TalkMore) and can use other services like Hosted Sharepoint, Hosted Exchange and PC Data backup for emailing and storing digital data and files.

Home Lite offers 2GB monthly download limit for £7.95 a month and includes other features like 10 email addresses and 50MB of personal web space to build your own website.

With Home Select deal, you get 10GB monthly usage allowance, 10 email addresses and 100MB of personal web space for £12.95 a month.

Home Pro is ideal for heavy users or professionals. Home Pro comes with free setup, wireless router and huge 50GB monthly download limit. You also get free overnight usage, Eclipse TalkMore telephone connection, free domain name, 10 email addresses, 100 MB of personal web space and PC Backup service.

Eclipse Home Office, the basic business service from the provider offers 3 GB usage allowance for £14.95 a month and also includes one email address and a TalkMore phone service.

Business 20 will now cost £19.95 a month. You get unlimited email addresses, one free domain name, 250MB web space, TalkMore and access to one Hosted Sharepoint service.

Business 50 which offers 50GB usage allowance will cost £29.95 a month. You get unlimited email addresses, one free domain name, 250MB web space, TalkMore and access to five Hosted Sharepoint services and two Hosted Exchange services.

With Business Unlimited broadband packages you get two 250MB web space, unlimited email addresses and two domain names and access to ten Hosted Sharepoint and five Hosted Exchange services. The package will cost £49.95 a month.