BT breaks into mobile broadband with pre-pay service

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 27 Apr 2009 at 09:33

BT has belatedly entered the mobile broadband market with the launch of a pre-pay service for new and existing customers.

BT has been offering mobile broadband to business customers since last October, and now it's extending the deal to residential customers.

Customers on BT Total Broadband options 1 or 2 can add mobile broadband to their service for a one-off fee of £50, while those on the premium option 3 package get the mobile broadband dongle for only £10. There's no monthly charge, over and above what they already pay for home broadband.

Customers are given an 18-month contract with a monthly data cap of 1GB. Extra data costs a punitive £10 per GB or £15 for 3GB. BT customers are, however, given at least 250 minutes a month on the company's nationwide Wi-Fi network, which is accessible through the dongle.

Non-BT customers can pay £130 for a standalone mobile broadband dongle with an 18-month contract and 1GB of data per month.

BT claims the deal gives it the cheapest home and mobile broadband package in the country, with Option 1 customers getting both for £15.65 per month (plus the £50 fee for the dongle).

However, many of BT's customers may well have already signed contracts with other broadband providers. Why has it taken BT so long to get into the game? "Mobile broadband has been around for a while," concedes Nick Rawlings, head of mobile at BT. "It's taken time to get the software wrap that comes with the modem right. We weren't prepared to take an off-the-shelf variant."

BT's service is based on the Vodafone network, and uses the Huawei E180 modem, which offers support for HSDPA downloads of up to 7.2Mbits/sec.

BT is using that headline speed figure in its press release, even though Vodafone recently conceded to PC Pro that customers will never hit that figure in real life.

"We talk much less now about theoretical speeds but the real speeds customers are likely to get, and that's somewhere between 1Mbits/sec and 5Mbits/sec," Vodafone told us last month.