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Everyday users

Posted on 11 Feb 2009 at 10:28

The choice between mobile broadband and ADSL becomes markedly more complex when you come to "everyday users" - people with two or three PCs in the house, who upload photos to the web, download the odd television programme, have an internet radio in the back bedroom and perhaps dabble in a little online gaming.

Such typical family setups will generally involve a home network, with an ADSL or cable wireless router allowing PCs around the house to share the internet connection. On the face of it, replacing the ADSL router with a mobile broadband dongle looks like a compromise too far. No teenager is going to sit patiently waiting for Dad to finish with the dongle on his work laptop, so they can update their Facebook profile on the home PC, and buying a dongle and separate connection for each PC is hardly economical.

That's why 3, T-Mobile and others have begun selling mobile broadband routers. They essentially act as both wired and wireless docks for your USB dongle, allowing you to take the stick out on the road and slot it back in the router when you get home. They boast many of the features you'd expect to find on conventional ADSL/cable routers, including WPA encryption, UPnP support for devices such as media streamers and even relatively sophisticated port and site blocking, if you want to prevent the kids from accessing certain sites or file sharing.

In our tests of the mobile broadband routers, we managed to surf the web at a decent clip on more than one computer, although performance suffered when we tried using an internet radio. The speed of the connection can ebb away slightly over the wireless connection, and with even the best HSDPA connections only hitting top speeds just north of 2Mbits/sec, you'll probably find that splitting that connection between multiple PCs and other devices in the home delivers a poorer experience than a decent ADSL or cable connection.

That's not to say mobile broadband routers don't have their place in the home - they could be the perfect solution for those back bedrooms or converted sheds/garages at the bottom of the garden, where the home ADSL router won't reach.

There are other good reasons why mobile broadband isn't quite ready to replace ADSL in the family home, however. The limited bandwidth and data caps aren't well suited to homes with multiple PCs, each of which could be trying to simultaneously download data in the background. "You'll have all the antivirus updates coming through it, all the Windows updates coming through it - Windows XP SP3, for example, which is still doing the rounds," Ferguson points out. "The scale of the data [coming through in the background] is impossible to know.

"There's so much software out there doing 4-5MB downloads, which is usually fine," he adds. "But if you're going over your data limit, that's £10 just to update your antivirus."

Best broadband deal: for a decent combination of download speed and no data cap, O2's fixed-line Premium broadband package offers an up-to-16Mbits/sec connection for only £10 per month to existing O2 mobile customers, or £15 otherwise. Avoid O2's mobile broadband, however, since it remains one of the slowest on the market.

Next: Gamers & heavy downloaders

Broadband: Fixed vs broadband

Author: Barry Collins