Today, a decade and a half later, I’ve taken delivery of a Samsung Galaxy S II. If ever you wanted an illustration of the phenomenal pace at which technology advances, here it is. In what seems like an alarmingly short time, we’ve progressed from that rudimentary brick to a slim, slate-style affair with a vibrant full-colour touchscreen, a feature list as long as your arm, 16GB of internal storage and, well, slightly better battery life.

Consider that voice calls are now just a small part of a smartphone’s job and you could question whether the two phones are even really the same sort of device.

The change that’s really struck me, though, is the pricing. Back in 1996 I paid £30 for my old mr20, then signed up to Orange’s popular “Talk 15” plan. At £17.50 a month, this gave me a generous 15 minutes of voice calls a month, after which calls cost 10p a minute to Orange phones and, presumably, more to other sorts of phone. Hey, it was a long time ago.

As I mentioned, I couldn’t send SMS messages from my phone, and as for data services, forget it. This was 1996: most of us didn’t have the internet on our landlines, let alone our mobiles.

Now compare my new O2 contract, which starts today. Once more I’ve paid £30 up-front for the phone, and from here on I’ll be paying £21.50 a month. Accounting for inflation, that makes my new contract about 20% cheaper than my old Talk 15 tariff. Yet for that money I get vastly more than before: 200 minutes of talk time, unlimited text messages and 500MB of internet usage.

To be fair, the contract’s longer (two years, rather than one), but still, this represents an incredible increase in value. It’s easy to grumble about mobile phone providers, and often they deserve it: I’m sure we’ve all had frustrating experiences where providers switch around contracts in unwelcome ways, demand exorbitant fees for bog-standard services, screw up your credit rating or point-blank refuse to help with technical problems.

But when I reflect that, compared to my undergraduate self, I’m getting around 15 times as many minutes for my money – plus text messages – plus internet access – plus a phone that is itself, quite simply, gorgeous – it’s hard to feel too hard done by.

And I have to admit, I get a little excited trying to imagine what sort of phone I could possibly have in 15 years to make the S II look as ridiculously antiquated as the mr20 does now.

What terrible tariffs have you been on in the past? What chunky phones are you now ashamed to admit you once proudly carried around in an unseemly bulging pocket? While my positive mood lasts I’m declaring an amnesty, so share your worst!

On first inspection, Ofcom paints a rosy picture of the state of mobile broadband in Britain. O2 (somewhat surprisingly, given our past real-world tests) tops the charts with average speeds close to 3Mbits/sec, with only Orange customers looking like they should find a new network.

However, examine Ofcom’s testing methodology more closely, and it becomes clear that those chart-topping 3Mbits/sec speeds are likely to be far higher than the average customer will receive.

3G only

Ofcom tested two different types of speed test: an automated “network capability” speedtest conducted by well-known testing firm Epitiro, and a more real-world test with a panel of 1,179 consumers.

The Epitiro test was conducted using static probes from numerous sites dotted around the country (locations pictured below).

However, as Ofcom admits, those sites were cherry picked, with only those offering the best 3G/HSPA speeds across all five networks making the cut. “More than 160 of the 600 candidate sites were surveyed to determine what coverage of 3G/HSPA services were provided by each of the five MNOs [networks],” Ofcom’s report states. “Sites where good 3G/HSPA coverage was available for the majority of MNOs were prioritised for deployment of probes.”

Not surprisingly, therefore, the overall average speed recorded by the static probes – 2.1Mbits/sec – is considerably higher than the average speed recorded by the consumer panel – 1.5 Mbits/sec – which includes both 2G and 3G speeds.

Yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, Ofcom has chosen only to publish network-specific average speeds using the artificial Epitiro tests, and not the real-world consumer tests.

Download tests

Ofcom/Epitiro didn’t only cherry pick the download sites – the test they used to measure download speeds also gives a highly unrealistic measure of performance.

Before I go any further, let’s all put our cards on the table: any type of benchmark, be it the PC Pro Real World Benchmarks or Ofcom’s mobile broadband tests, all involve a degree of artificiality. Benchmarks are designed to test the relative performance of one product/company against another using pre-determined metrics – they’re not necessarily indicative of actual consumer experience.

That said, the methodology used by Ofcom/Epitiro to measure web page download time is so far removed from the real-world experience as to be almost worthless, in my opinion.

“The webpage download test involved measuring the time taken to download the HTML ‘skeleton’ of three popular UK websites,” Ofcom’s report states. “The time taken to download the associated media assets, such as images and graphics were not included.”

Consequently, Ofcom admits that “the web page download times measured may be significantly faster than the time it would take to download a full web page with all images”. You don’t say.

Ofcom claims it would take an O2 customer an average of 1.5 seconds to download a web page – I’ve never seen page-loading times as fast as that on any mobile broadband network. In fact, you’re lucky to see those kinds of speeds on ADSL.

Image compression

Ofcom claims one of the reasons it decided to omit images from its tests is because some networks compress website images, while others download full-resolution photos, potentially skewing the results. A fair point.

The two networks that compress images – O2 and T-Mobile – come first and third respectively in Ofcom’s webpage download tests.

Yet, in my experience, the networks that compress images usually offer the worst page-load times, as the process of compressing the image on their own proxy server often takes longer than downloading the full-res image. In fact, image compression is usually the first thing I switch off (if the network even lets you).

So, by failing to take into account the bulk of page content (images are obviously far more data intensive than text) and the potential impact of image compression, Ofcom’s page download times should really be taken with an enormous pinch of condiments.

Worthless tests?

Does that mean Ofcom’s entire mobile broadband tests are baseless? Absolutely not. They are highly detailed tests, with a lot of very useful information in there for people considering a mobile broadband contract.

However, if you think you’re likely to regularly get 3Mbits/sec and page download times of 1.5 seconds, I suggest you’re sorely mistaken.

What’s frustrated me isn’t the wait as such – obviously I’d rather get the upgrade sooner rather than later, but I’m old and jaded enough to take these things philosophically. And yes, I understand that O2 needs to test the update fully before it can roll it out to customers and take responsibility for supporting it.

But it does seem to be taking an unaccountably long time, especially when you note that (as reader Alan Robertson pointed out in a recent email) Android 2.2 has been running on unbranded handsets without issue since the day of release.

And in the meantime, those of us with branded phones are barred from trying it out independently: though the software is freely available, my phone is restricted to installing only O2-approved firmware, as and when the company sees fit to make it available. Hmm, why did I ditch the iPhone again?

De-branding the phone

Happily, there’s a solution. Cast around the internet and you’ll find plenty of resources telling you how to flash your Android phone with generic firmware, which removes all customisations made by O2 — or by Vodafone, Rogers, Bharti Airtel or whoever your provider may be. Once it’s done you can install OS upgrades as soon as Google releases them, without having to wait for your provider to perform its own testing (and slap on its own branding). And this morning, having decided to wait no longer for an official O2 upgrade, I performed the procedure on my phone.

There’s a certain amount of hackery involved in the process, and once you start off down that road you’re on your own.

It’s worth noting that there’s a certain amount of hackery involved in the process, and once you start off down that road you’re on your own. Good luck getting support if you run into difficulties while trying to install an unsupported OS. And even if the installation goes perfectly, you may hit problems down the line if, for any reason, you need to send your phone back for repairs: de-branding your phone shouldn’t affect its operation in any significant way, but companies like to find excuses to void warranties.

But to me that’s the joy of technology. It’s taking ownership of your device, and making it work for you in ways that weren’t previously possible, even if — no, especially if that means creatively sidestepping technical and practical obstructions. Once I’d got the generic firmware onto my phone, it immediately picked up the Android 2.2 update, and though I’d done nothing cleverer than finding and following some instructions, it felt like both an achievement and a reward.

Getting away with it

And the thing about Android is that, so far as the OS and network are concerned, my device is still a perfectly regular handset, just like you might buy SIM-free from an online retailer. Unlike users of a certain other phone, I’ve no need to fear that future updates will seek to punish my audacity in tweaking my own phone, by deliberately breaking it or disabling features.

For me, though, that’s not the best part. That came a few hours ago, just as I was preparing to flash my phone with the generic firmware. I’d used the USB debug tools to get the CID from my phone, generated a custom boot sector and was just about to dump it onto my microSD card to create a key device for firmware updates when I realised that – at that precise moment in time – I had never been happier to be an Android user.

The price plans that have been released — from O2, Orange and Vodafone — are rather convoluted, with mind-melting, eye-bleeding charts. O2’s announcement even lead to an email exchange between a bewildered Barry Collins and a losing-the-will-to-live myself, as we tried to understand whether they were or weren’t selling the iPhone at the same upfront cost regardless of contract length (they are, but it depends on how you look at it. We think. Maybe.)

Here’s our stripped-down chart to help you get started — click on it to view it in a larger size, but it’s also available here, which is probably easier to look at than the one embedded below.

Keep in mind some contracts include more features than others, with European roaming and more included in some.

How much will it cost?

So which is the cheapest contract? Again, that depends on how you look at it. The cheapest overall total cost of ownership for the 16GB version is on a £30/month, 18-month contract with O2. But while that rings in at just £749, you can get the same phone for £759 at Vodafone, doubling your mobile downloads for £10 spread over 18 months — giving you an extra 500MB per month for £0.55. O2 would charge an extra £5 per 500MB per month.

Alternatively, you could upgrade from the 16GB to the 32GB over a two-year-contract for just £44, doubling your storage for under £2 a month.

The most intriguing thing to note is how frequently the offers between rival operators work out nearly the same — identically, in a few cases. Both O2 and Vodafone offer the 16GB version for free on their top end monthly charges. The upfront cost, monthly cost, and data downloads are exactly the same, with a total cost of £1170.

It’s also worth nothing that committing for two long years might not save you anything over signing up for a shorter 18-month contract, especially on O2.

If Orange is your preferred operator, buyer beware. While the three operators are quite similar on mid-range contracts, Orange’s total cost wanders higher than its rivals on the low and high end of the scale.

With the total cost of its cheapest iPhone costing £100 more than an arguably comparable package from Vodafone, Orange also has the most expensive way to get an iPhone on our chart, with the 32GB version on a two-year, £75 contract coming in at a whopping £1,829 — but that also includes tethering, Wi-Fi, 100 European minutes and 20MB of roaming data, which would add up pretty quickly on one of the other networks.

The iPhone 4 can also be bought SIM-free straight from Apple, with only Orange currently offering prices for its pay-as-you-go plans. These include 250MB of internet access for a year. That could be the cheapest way to get the iPhone 4, but not if you intend to use it for anything other than as an object d’art to gaze admiringly at.

Click here for the updated version of the chart.

“We don’t think it’s fair that the many should subsidise the behaviour of the few, and we think that we have a responsibility to our customers to address this kind of imbalance,” Dunne stated.

I’ll have you know that I’m the proud holder of A-level maths (grade C), and so I’ve dug my calculator out. By my reckoning:

O2 had 26 million customer accounts at the start of 2010, so it has 26,000 heavy data users

26 million x 200MB = 5,200,000,000 MB total data usage across the network per month

5,200,000,000MB  ÷ 3 = 1,733,333,333MB per month used by the 26,000 heavy data users

That means the average heavy data user consumes a staggering 66,666MB (so around 65GB) per month

Quite how anyone manages to download 65GB per month over a 3G connection is beyond me. You’d have to be running the connection round-the-clock. And indeed, when I put that scenario to O2’s press office, the spokesperson said that’s exactly what’s happening.

But instead of punishing the few to protect the many, O2 has done the exact opposite: it’s put a 500MB cap on previously “unlimited” accounts to ward off the data hogs.

If the rapacious appetites of the minority was causing O2 such a problem, why didn’t it impose a ceiling of, say, 5GB a month? By my calculations (A-level maths, remember) that would still wipe almost a third off O2’s total data traffic and only potentially infuriate a relative handful of its customers.

Instead, 26 million customers are now going to have to keep a careful eye on their data consumption, or risk being hit for excess charges of £5 per 500MB.

O2 insists that 97% of its smartphone customers will be unaffected by the 500MB cap and that the new charges will allow it to better plan investment in its network. “We have invested £½ billion in our network over the last two years; £10bn to date,” an O2 spokesperson told me. “In November 2009 we unveiled plans to accelerate our network growth, totalling £100 million over the coming year. This includes building 1,550 new sites across the UK by the end of this year.”

That’s all well and good, but let’s not pretend  an enormous data bill is destroying O2’s finances. O2 owner Telefonica recently announced annual profits of €1.6 billion, with its earnings statement paying tribute to the enormous growth in revenue from mobile broadband services.

O2’s CEO describes these changes as “fair and transparent”. I’m willing to credit him with the “transparent” bit.

The core Sky Mobile TV News and Sports app is available for free, and offers full listings for the core sports and news channels. But for the paltry sum of £6 a month, you can stream live coverage from those channels over a Wi-Fi connection.

For that price you’ll get the full Sky Sports package of 1,2, 3 and Xtra, Sky Sports News and Sky News, as well as the added subscription channels ESPN and At The Races.

ESPN alone – thanks to its Premiership football matches – will add £9 to a Sky TV bill which will already be at least £36 with the Sports package, so the £6 app looks like staggeringly good value. And a limited number of iPhone owners with O2 can get three months free to try it for themselves.

I downloaded the app and signed up to test it and it works flawlessly. The connection to Wi-Fi is instant, the channels load in seconds, and the admittedly YouTube-quality footage runs smoothly and is surprisingly watchable on the small screen.

Obviously it’s dependant on being able to connect to Wi-Fi when you’re out and about, but the thought of being able to watch the Monday night ESPN match in an airport or on a commute is wonderful. It manages to make the overpriced channel seem palatable.

Horse racing channel At The Races is probably less of a draw for most, but its inclusion isn’t too surprising given its importance to Sky’s gambling arm, SkyBET.

The obvious comparison to Sky Mobile TV is Spotify, but they’re really very different beasts. Spotify’s unlimited music will take time to prove its worth at £10 a month, particularly as we already own so much music on our phones. But this is live sport, something that can’t really be had anywhere but your living room or the pub. And it’s priced low enough that it really doesn’t register on your budgetary consciousness. Spotify will no doubt be watching with considerable interest.

As will I. So if anyone needs me I’ll be enjoying the tennis under my desk. Just don’t tell Tim.

Orange’s big unveiling of its iPhone tariffs has caused a bit of a kerfuffle, not least because its prices are almost identical to those of O2. A lot of people are up in arms about the promise of “unlimited browsing”, which in fact comes with a fair-use limit of 750MB.

But, ignoring the terrible decision to put an “unlimited” label on a very clearly capped tariff, is that amount of monthly data actually “fair-use”?

As discussed in this week’s podcast, there’s a very easy way for existing iPhone owners to find out if that data cap would prove troublesome. Just go to Settings -> General -> Usage, and take a look at your Cellular Network Data. I did just that, believing this cap would be encroaching at least a little on my roaming lifestyle, but I was in for a surprise.

Having never reset it manually, that’s my total cellular data usage since I bought my iPhone 13 months ago. Yes, 789MB in 13 months – or around 60MB a month. The internal counter may not be entirely accurate – as many will be quick to point out – but a quick check on the last six months of my itemised O2 bills backs it up. I simply don’t use anything like the data I imagined.

True, it doesn’t include data downloaded via Wi-Fi – which discounts much of my usage at home and at work – but that’s surely not unusual. When I’m out and about on the 3G network I download apps, I browse the internet on my commute, I check the football scores in the pub, I read and send emails and spend too much time on Facebook and Twitter. I’d guess a typical day with my iPhone isn’t at all dissimilar from the vast majority of consumers.

Even if I used my iPhone for business, it’s hard to envisage a realistic scenario in which I’d download more than 12 times the amount of data I already do – with the speed of 3G I doubt I’d even have the patience. The only thing I can think of that may contribute heavily is streaming media, but there are very few apps of that kind that don’t specify Wi-Fi as a must.

Sure, there’ll always be the odd power user who blitzes any cap, which the networks will point out is the entire reason for the majority of us being covered by the fair use policy. But in this case the fair-use cap size does at least appear to be pretty fair.

If only Orange hadn’t tried to hide it behind that word…

UPDATE: To put my casual-user figures in perspective, here is the data usage (in KB per month) for an iPhone power-user working for our sister title MacUser. As you can see, even someone pushing the iPhone 3G, and then 3GS, to the limits – with apps and media featuring prominently – has only once come within 100MB of hitting that 750MB cap, although his monthly average is rising.

Ofcom’s latest research into broadband speeds

One of the most noteworthy of these is that broadband customers on local loop unbundled (LLU) lines – where the ISP has put its own equipment in the telephone exchange – are generally on much faster connections than those with connections delivered by BT Wholesale.

The graph below shows the difference in speed is particularly marked during the peak daytime and evening hours (click on graph to enlarge):

Ofcom says: “this slowdown during peak periods is the result of contention on the network as multiple users share the same backhaul bandwidth. The faster average speeds delivered by LLU operators are likely to be a reflection of the lower cost per unit of backhaul capacity for operators using their own network compared to the cost of renting capacity from wholesale suppliers (such as BT Wholesale or Cable & Wireless).”

O2 is top dog among the LLU providers, delivering “significantly faster speeds” than TalkTalk, Tiscali and AOL. You may also remember from yesterday’s figures that O2 was the only ISP whose peak time speeds were no lower its off-peak: unlike BT, which saw its peak-time speeds drop by almost 20%.

Remember that many ISPs – including O2 – have customers on both LLU and wholesale lines (or ‘on-net’ and ‘off-net’), so if you’re planning to defect from a wholesale provider, make sure you’re not just signing up for more of the same.

Both Apple and Palm have decided to lock their devices exclusively to the O2 network. But as Ofcom’s network-by-network maps show, O2 has by far the patchiest 3G coverage of any of the UK’s five mobile networks.

As we can see from the O2 coverage map shown above, vast swathes of Wales, Scotland, the north of England, Norfolk and Cornwall have no 3G coverage whatsoever. Even parts of London and the Home Counties are not covered.

In typical Ofcom fashion, the regulator doesn’t even have the confidence to back its own data, stating clearly that the January 2009 map data “was not collected for the purpose of examining detailed mobile coverage therefore the availability or quality of mobile services cannot be assumed from these maps”.

So I visited O2’s own website and decided to inspect the company’s own HSDPSA coverage map (shown below right). It paints a remarkably similar picture, with Wales, Scotland, East Anglia and the South West virtually bereft of 3G coverage.

The iPhone requires a decent 3G connection to take full advantage of key features such as the App Store, full web browsing and downloading maps – the very same features that O2 and Apple trumpet in their glossy TV adverts. So why are Apple and Palm hitching their wagon to a network that patently can’t deliver such services to large parts of the UK?

If Ofcom needs a good reason to ban phone manufacturers from signing exclusive deals with mobile phone networks, it’s just found one.

Here, for example, are two mobile broadband dongles from O2 (left) and BT (click here to read about BT’s new mobile broadband service). One causes me endless hassle on the train journey into work of a morning, while the other is painless. The difference? That little white piece of string that keeps the BT dongle’s cap connected to its body. 

Something as innocuous as a cap retainer might sound utterly trivial, but I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve ended up on my hands and knees, picking my way through the half-eaten bag of Doritos and discarded newspapers under the train table, trying to find the AWOL O2 cap. It doesn’t even fit on the other end of the stick!

The BT cap, meanwhile, remains firmly anchored to the stick, no matter how many hard-disk threatening bumps the train encounters.  How much does that little piece of string add to the cost of the device? A tiny fraction of sod all. How much difference does it my mobile broadband “experience”? A pretty sizeable one.