Subscriptions & services

Posted on 3 Sep 2008 at 11:34

One PC Pro staffer managed to negotiate a £100 discount on a new handset and a free unlimited data tariff when his contract expired recently, earning him a "free" phone and cutting his monthly bills at a stroke.
£160 on a new handset and £5 per month data tariff; there may be even better deals for customers on more expensive contracts.

Join FON or find free wi-fi

Paying through the nose for Wi-Fi hotspots is largely unavoidable in places such as airport lounges and coffee shops (unless you've got a 3G dongle in your laptop bag, of course). However, if you're a member of the FON community, it's entirely possible to find free Wi-Fi in the wider world.

The broadband-sharing service allows you to legitimately and securely open a portion of your connection to passers-by. In return, you can borrow Wi-Fi from thousands of other members' connections when you're away from home. BT Broadband customers can join FON for free at www.btfon.com/register. Non-BT customers can sign up by buying the La Fonera router for £38 from www.fon.com.

If you don't want the bother of signing up for FON there are other ways to find free wireless. As its name suggests, www.free-hotspot.com lists hundreds of free Wi-Fi venues across the country. There are more than 100 in London alone. The site also provides instructions on how your business can become a secure, free hotspot - helping you to drag in extra revenue from grateful customers in the process.
£60 to £70, assuming you use a Wi-Fi hotspot just once a month.

Download your music

No, we're not about talking peer-to-peer networking or anything illegal. We're simply talking about downloading from online stores rather than in physical form. After years of a bizarre situation where downloads tended to be the same price or even more than physical CDs, the cost of downloading complete albums is now usually lower if you find the right store. What's more, you don't have to be tied into ridiculous DRM restrictions. For example, the CD of Coldplay's latest album, Viva La Vida, is £8.98 on Amazon, but at www.7digital.co.uk, you can download in DRM-free, 320Kb/sec MP3 format for £7.49.
From £2 to £5 per album - plus, no DRM restrictions.

Sign up for a Sim-only mobile phone contract

We're all used to the bonus of a "free" handset upgrade at the end of our annual mobile phone contract but, in reality, there's nothing free about it. That new handset is what makes your monthly line rental as high as it is, so next time, ask yourself if there's anything wrong with the phone you've happily used all year.

Some networks offer SIM-only deals, which remove the unnecessary cost of a handset and provide the line rental you desire - some aren't even contracts at all. At the end of a recent 12-month contract, one PC Pro writer recently switched to O2's matching SIM-only alternative. The result: a monthly line rental that dropped by half from £30 to £15, the same 200 minutes and 400 texts, and the ability to walk away from O2 at a mere month's notice. For that we'll gladly keep our perfectly usable year-old handset.