The bright future

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One of the pitfalls of moving into a new flat – or even one which has only been empty for a couple of months – is that you'll probably find that BT have disconnected the phone line. This turned out to be the case for us. Understandably, being faced with a £125 re-connection fee, the prospect of paying £11-a-month line rental, an extra £15 or so for broadband and then a little bit extra for the privilege of making a few phone calls didn't really appeal.

I hardly ever use the phone for actually making calls (the only time I ever use it is to speak to my family at home), but having internet access has become a necessity these days. With this in mind, I thought I'd investigate some of the mobile broadband packages all the phone companies seem to be offering at the moment.

In the end, I went with Orange. For £15/month, you get connection speeds of "up to" 7.2Mbps – as good as, if not better than, you can get on a landline – and a 3Gb monthly limit. Again, the same as many home broadband packages. 3 and Vodafone both offer a similar deal, but I've never had any experience of 3, and Vodafone couldn't offer the top-speed service in our area just yet. Being an Orange customer already meant that I knew the signal was strong in our gaff, and that their customer service is pretty decent. Setting it up was easy: despite being warned it could take hours to activate my account, I was online within ten minutes of getting home.

So, I now have truly wireless broadband on my laptop. Thanks to a lot of messing about, I've also managed to get my computer working as a wireless access point, so the connection can be shared around the flat, too.

Let this be a warning to you, BT: this technology will only get cheaper and faster in the future... the landline's days are numbered.

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