The mobile broadband packages are really heating up now in the UK. There’s been a noticeable push in the high-streets to sell USB modems. Of course, there are competing speed and coverage claims. No doubt, the consumer won’t know how to differentiate, but they might be a little more wary of speed claims now that there have been quite a few notable campaigns against exaggerated speed claims for fixed broadband. If we thought bandwidth contention was bad on fixed, wait until consumers get a taste of it on cellular!

Anyhow, the bottom line is that mobile broadband obviously ain’t fixed broadband, even though there are already some wild claims to the contrary, saying how mobile can exceed fixed. This is in exceptional cases. If you get a whole cell to yourself and you also live in Land’s End, a galaxy away from the (BT) exchange, then this might be true.

What to do if you find yourself with less-than-friendly bandwidth and if you’re also on a package that’s not all you can eat, like the apparently useful 3 UK pay-as-you-go per month package. Consumers need to become mindful of ways to access info using less bandwidth, which is something we always hoped would disappear after we left the GPRS modem days - remember those? Don’t! It’s too painful (and thanks Apple for reminding me by choosing O2 as your network without great Edge coverage and for picking The Cloud - ‘I can surf if I live in a pub’ - as the WiFi partner - I’m so hoping that the 3G device is imminent, as per the rumours).

The killer is using those web apps that get richer and richer, take longer to load and are most definitely designed with fat-pipes-that-never-get-skinny-in-mind. My tip is to find the mobile site, if they have one, and use this, at least for those really squeezed moments. I’ve even had to resort to this in some hotels with crummy WiFi coverage, as happens from time to time. So, for example, you can access Google apps via the mobile start page, or just simply try the HTML-only version (Oh - that’s what it’s for - well, not really, but it’s faster). The mobile calendar site works really well. In fact, I prefer the less cluttered design of the mobile UI to the desktop one! I think that someone from Google should be talking to 37signals about their less-is-more mantra.

Similarly, I often prefer to check my Facebook page at a glance using the Facebook’s iPhone UI, which, for those who haven’t realised yet, doesn’t mean you need an iPhone to access it. It actually works well in a desktop browser, for what it does.

Of course, operators tend to use network accelerators, like the hefty one from ByteMobile. It runs even better with a client-side install, but I haven’t seen any mention of this in the high street offerings. It’s probably one of those things you don’t want to mention in case it gives the impression that the service is slow in the first place (which it might well be some, or a lot, of the time).

Anyway, I’m writing in totally the wrong place about all this stuff. I’m sure that some consumer guide somewhere, like Which, has a list of ways to get more from mobile broadband. I must take a look.

Technorati Tags: mobile broadband, UK, 3 UK, Apple, O2