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The Internet is now such an important part of life that it's hard to function without being able to get online whenever and wherever you need to. Broadband is all very well, but it's useless when you're not at home; and when you're out with your laptop, finding a WiFi hotspot, and figuring out how much you have to pay who to use it, is often too much hassle to bother with.

3G broadband looks like the answer. Using a small USB device, you connect your computer to the Internet via one of the mobile phone networks. With high speeds now available over much of the UK, you can get on the Internet almost anywhere, and as with home broadband you just pay an affordable monthly fee.

As we were preparing this issue of Computer Buyer, O2 became the last of the major UK networks to announce a consumer 3G broadband service, so it seemed the perfect time to compare the deals on offer. The other players are 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone. As with mobile phone tariffs, you won't be surprised to learn that each mobile operator provides a range of confusingly worded and presented accounts with lots of small print to wade through before you buy. We've done a lot of this hard work for you, and our reviews and tables show you exactly what you get with each account.

That said, we'd still recommend reading the small print carefully to make sure you don't get caught out by any hidden fees or overly restrictive policies that stop you doing what you want to. Whereas most home broadband accounts are genuinely 'unlimited', most mobile solutions do impose a cap, though a fairly high one,

Internet in your pocket

Mobile broadband accounts come with a USB modem that lets your computer connect to the high-speed 3G mobile network. Once connected, you can access the Internet just like you would on your broadband line at home, and at similarly high speeds. In fact, unless you have a top-of-the-range ADSL or cable account, your mobile link may actually be faster.

Which is one reason why mobile broadband isn't only useful when you're on the move. At home, if you're too far from the local BT exchange to get really fast ADSL performance, using a 3G mobile connection could be faster. If you already have decent broadband and it's essential to your work, a 3G account would make a useful backup. Finally, if you don't use your phone line for anything except broadband, and your usage would be likely to fall within the allowed limits on a 3G tariff, you might find mobile access works out cheaper, since there's no line rental to pay.

Impressively, these services are also very easy to use. The USB modems (sometimes referred to as a 'dongle', a generic term for any small widget that plugs into your PC) supplied by each network as part of your subscription come with their own software drivers installed on flash memory. All you have to do is insert the dongle into a spare port on your PC, and it automatically installs the necessary connection software, so you're ready to go. This is also handy if you're out without your own laptop and need to get a friend or colleague's computer online in a hurry.

Up to speed

Past experience of Internet access on mobile phones hasn't been encouraging, but the data networks have got a lot faster. The current technology is called 'high speed downlink packet access' (HSDPA), a term that singularly fails to explain anything, but what matters is that it significantly increases the download speeds of mobile devices, with some of the services here capable of up to 7.2Mbit/sec - close to the maximum 8Mbit/sec currently available on landline ADSL.