Gallery

Businesses

Posted on 11 Feb 2009 at 10:32

For many self-employed professionals or small businesses, the dilemma isn't whether to plump for ADSL or mobile broadband, but whether they can afford to do without either. It would be enormously brave for any business - especially an internet-facing one - to entrust their sole internet connection to 3G. But it's the perfect complement to ADSL for businesses that routinely have people working from home or out of the office.

"Previously, travellers had a [Wi-Fi] hotspot subscription," said Andrew Ferguson, editor of Thinkbroadband.com. "Now it's a case of you park up and go online wherever you need to."

While today's smartphones are more than capable of handling remote email, Ferguson argues that mobile broadband has made it far easier to run other business-critical apps on the road. "If you've got corporate applications - software that's running across a VPN - then you're going to be looking more towards mobile broadband," he said.

The vast majority of the mobile broadband services will allow you to access your company's VPN, and some - such as Vodafone's Mobile Connect software - come with a VPN client. However, check whether your particular network and price plan are VPN-compatible before buying: T-Mobile, for example, permits VPN access on pay monthly contracts, but not on pay-as-you-go plans. Other networks require you to configure your mobile broadband software to use a particular access point name (APN) - a call to customer services is normally all that's required to get the correct APN.

ISPs are now beginning to bundle mobile broadband services with fixed-line ADSL connections. BT, for example, provides new or renewing Business Total Broadband customers with one "free" mobile broadband account. Virgin Media and Orange also offer mobile broadband bundles, but only on their home products - which might be acceptable for homeworkers, but isn't really an option for dedicated business lines.

The beauty of the self-installing mobile broadband dongles is that small businesses can pass them around the office. A small team of estate agents could share a single dongle, for example, so they could show clients particulars of potential houses while out on visits.

There's one potential pitfall to using the same dongle in multiple laptops, however: keeping track of your data usage. While the client software that comes with all the mobile dongles will count the total data downloaded over a month on that particular machine, most providers don't offer a way of keeping tabs on the amount of data downloaded over the connection as a whole. An honourable exception is 3, which allows users to register with an online usage checker. On other networks, businesses will either need to keep a rough manual tally across all the different machines, or restrict the use of the dongle to a single laptop, if they want to avoid creeping over the cap.

"With some of them, if you go over the usage limit, you're going to start racking up the costs," warned Ferguson. O2, for example, will charge customers 20p for every megabyte they creep over their cap, while BT issues a 10p penalty for every megabyte over the mark - that's roughly £200 and £100 per extra gigabyte respectively. And they say the days of rip-off data charges are over.

Using your mobile broadband stick abroad can also be costly. Charges range from the reasonable to the downright outrageous - even on the same network. Use your mobile broadband in one of the countries on Vodafone's "Connect Abroad" list and you'll be charged a modest £10 per day. If your destination isn't on that list, you're staring down the barrel of £5 per megabyte, which is ludicrous.