O2 Mobile Broadband

Unusually, the home page for O2’s business service invites you to select how many users you’d like to sign up: anything from one to ten. The bad news is this doesn’t automatically apply a discount, with the cost sticking at £17.02 exc VAT per user if you sign up for 12 months and £12.77 exc VAT for 18 or 24 months (the latter deal discounts to £8.51 per month for the first four months).

Those tariffs all assume a 3GB monthly usage, with a cost of 15p per megabyte if you exceed that limit. This rounds up to £150 for 1GB, which is why heavy internet users should consider the 9GB option. This costs £32.34 exc VAT or £23.83 exc VAT per month, depending on length of contract.

You can also sign up to O2’s Data Abroad tariffs. For £10 per user per month, you get a 10MB allowance; for £70 per user per month, 200MB. At time of purchase, you can choose the USB modem, a PC Card version or an ExpressCard option, all of which are free.

O2 has sensibly partnered with The Cloud to give its mobile broadband customers access to all its hotpots, and the bundled software’s clever integration of hotspots is one of this product’s highlights. For instance, it will tell you if there’s a faster hotspot within range, or you can search for a hotspot based on your current location.

Unfortunately, you may need to as speed isn’t one of O2’s strengths. In our tests, it only managed a maximum of 440Kbits/sec, and potentially of even more annoyance if you’re out visiting a client is that image compression can’t be turned off in the software.

Click here to visit O2 Mobile Broadband