1. AOL is the cheapest, charging £4.99 a month offering up to 8Mb speeds and 10GB download limit. The minimum contract is one month and if you stay longer than 3 months you will pay £9.99 a month.  Check it out on the AOL website.

2. Be Broadband will offer you a faster 24Mb service with minimum contract of 3 months at £24.43 a month as well as line rental. Visit the Be website  for more details.

3. The cheapest mobile broadband provider is 3 charging £15 a month for a minimum of one month. It offers speeds up tp 7.2Mb and a 3GB monthly download limit. Note that the mobile network used to access the internet is not as reliable as a landline service. Visit the three website for more information and deals.

Note that Plusnet have a similar deal to AOL at a slightly more expensive £5.99 a month for 8Mb speeds and limit of 10GB. Click on the ad to the right for more info.

The company founded in 1997 has more than 300,000 customers to whom it sells more than one million services. The company has a policy of cutting costs by limiting their advertising and marketing – they rely on word of mouth recommendations.

Telecom Plus is popular with consumers who want to deal with one supplier who offers a range of services on one bill. It offers a monthly bill so that customers can keep track of their household budget. Their chief executive, Charles Wigoder claims that they could grow bigger and be more successful than their larger rivals - Carphone Warehouse. If you are interested in reading a review of the UK’s best broadband provider visit Mac broadband - in the ISP News – currently Zen Internet tops the charts.

Any customers out there with experience of Telecom Plus please let us know your views.

Interested to learn more visit the Utility Warehouse and the Carphone Warehouse websites.

The recommendations given here are for bundles that include line rental, phone calls and broadband. If your home is in a rural, or less populated area you can expect to pay £5-£15 more and your broadband may be slower too. Some of the most popular broadband providers (Zen, O2 and Be) do not offer home phone and broadband bundles.

Utility Warehouse, offer an excellent and competitive bundle which includes discounts for multiple services such as energy, phone and broadband. Their cheapest bundle  is Broadcall standard at £21.75 a month with a twelve month contract. Check out the details at the utility warehouse website and you can see a review of their offer on which.co.uk/uw

Plusnet offer a good value for money bundle at £17.24 a month for a 12 month contract. However a review of their customer service was rated as slightly below the standard of Utility Warehouse. Visit www.plus.net for offer details.

TalkTalk bundles include phone and broadband for £18.48 a month for an 18month contract. Not highly rated for customer service but check it out for yourself at www.talktalk.co.uk

Sky offers a monthly bundle at £29 a month for 12 month contract but only sky TV subscribers can get Sky phone and broadband but if you would like to have Sky TV its deals could prove to be attractive to you. Check out the sky website.

Deals include a router from Utility Warehouse or a wireless router from the other networks mentioned. If you would like to know more about routers please check out mac broadband in the guide section. Plusnet and Utility Warehouse offer a free connection service; other providers charge a set up fee of £30-£60.

However, all pay as you go deals are not created equal and switching can save you money and may provide you with a better service too. PAYG users are often poorly catered for when it comes to advice on choosing between PAYG deals. If you are a low PAYG mobile user (making 5 mins of calls and approx. 15 texts a month) you might save £20 per annum by switching from a big player to a company like Asda who offers a flat PAYG rate of 8p per minute and 4p per text. The most expensive PAYG rates are around 22p for calls and 12p per text. Moderate users (about 40 mins of calls and 40 texts a month) could save £100 a year by switching from the most expensive to the cheapest. If you are a high user (making  300 call minutes and more than 100 texts monthly) it might be worth paying on a monthly contract or Sim-only contract.

PAYG mobile deals change rapidly so its worth shopping around and considering the smaller providers like Tesco (visit www.tesco.co.uk ). They offer calls and texts at half price for five nominated phone numbers which might suit your usage mode. Alternatively, T-Mobile and O2 offer cheaper rates after the first few minutes of a call so useful if you often make long calls. Check out www.t-mobile.co.uk and www.o2.co.uk

If you are a high user and want to stick with PAYG make full use of PAYG incentives. For example, if you top up around£10 O2, T-mobile, Virgin Mobile (visit www.virginmedia.com ) and Vodafone at www.vodafone.co.uk all offer ‘free’ minutes or texts – the more you top up the more free time you will get. Vodafone does some really good free weekend deals so worth checking them out. Remember that if you top up less frequently than once a month many incentives will not be available to you. Tesco has the best top-up incentives as they offer ‘free’ credit in exchange for topping up by a minimum amount a month. A £10 top up will get you £10 free credit while a £15 top up gets you £30 free credit.

Source: www.which.co.uk

1. £10 free credit.

Switch to Orange, use your old number and they will give you £10 free credit. You will need to know your previous PAC network code before visiting www.orange.co.uk 

2. 1 in 3 chance to win

Every time you top up you could win a prize with Bright Top Ups: a one in three chance to bag laptops, texts and maybe a holiday.

3. Magic Numbers

Choose your three best mates to chat to for up to an hour for just 20p. Visit www.orange.co.uk to top up by £10 a month.

4. Phone Fund

For every £10 you top up Orange will currently add an extra £1 towards a new pay as you go phone …. usable at any Orange shop. Plus, £10 off all pay as you go handsets costing £29 or more.

5. Orange Wednesdays

Treat a friend to a night at the flicks with 2 for 1 cinema tickets every Wednesday. Text FILM to 241 or visit www.orange.co.uk for details.

Alternatively, save £10 on a handsome Alcatel OT-708 with touchscreen. When you buy either of these phones with Dolphin, you will also get free internet browsing -for Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and more … visit www.orange.co.uk/shop

Orange was named Best Network Operator at the 2009 What Mobile Awards … Orange had the highest average ratings and the most 5-out of 5 ratings of all the networks. They were also voted the UK’s Number 1 Mobile Broadband provider in YouGov’s latest dongle tracker report. Over 2,000 mobile broadband users took part in the survey. Orange now has the biggest 3G network, covering 93% of the population ……. this means we can use our pay as you go phones to keep doing the things we enjoy!

HAPPY NEW YEAR  2010

The price of a pay as you go mobile broadband dongle with o2 is £14.67 for this limited time offer – that is a bargain!

• Pay as you go daily price = £2 for upto 500MB of downloads
• Pay as you go weekly price = £7.50 for upto 1GB of downloads
• Pay as you go monthly price = £15 for upto 3GB of downloads

All the deals offer unlimited Wi-fi access.

Visit the o2 website to take advantage of this latest discount deal.

The Problem

Although mobile phone networks market 3G data-connected dongles as ‘broadband’ they are usually slower than wired broadband. The speed of the 3G connection and its ability to load web pages is affected by your location and how busy the network is at any given time. 4Mps is needed for landline broadband and the speed of your 3G connection in built up areas will probably be between 1Mbps-2Mbps.

The Solution

Try your laptop in different rooms (your home may have connection cold spots).

Invest in a mobile phone signal booster – expensive stuff! (visit the Cell Antenna website for more information).

Try the new Opera 10 web browser (free at www.opera.com ). It uses automatic compression to keep web pages loading quickly.

Finally, some websites offer an alternative mobile version that can be viewed on a laptop by entering a slightly different address. For example, for Facebook go to m.facebook.com.

The whole broadband market had been following the growth of mobile broadband – it was deemed that mobile connections would replace fixed broadband connections (at the home of office). Business users in particular were lined up for taking up mobile broadband – because of the flexibility it would bring business users whilst they were out and about.

Now that the uptake of mobile broadband is waining, the fixed line operators have rushed out to re-position themselves. The consensus – at least publicly and currently – is to affirm that mobile broadband was never seen as a replacement for fixed-line broadband, instead it is seen as supplemental;

BT broadband …

“We certainly believe there’s a role for mobile broadband. But we’ve always marketed our mobile broadband as a way of taking your broadband out of the home, rather than as a substitute for fixed broadband. For a stable and reliable broadband service, we believe fixed is best.”

Carphone Warehouse (owners of TalkTalk, AOL and Tiscali broadband) …

“We get a sense that the mobile broadband thing has peaked. We are seeing some of those people begin to realise that the bandwidth you get on mobile is so much less than you get on a fixed line. Mobile broadband is increasingly a supplementary rather than a substitutional thing, and an increasing proportion of Carphone sales are of pre-pay dongles. I carry one around with me and am also surprised now how much free Wi-Fi is available: on the train, a lot of hotels have it, bars etc. I’m using Wi-Fi more when I am out and about than mobile broadband.”

Virgin Media …

“We’ve always said that mobile broadband is complementary to fixed line not a replacement.”

Original article was on the Guardian website.

The guys over at Broadband Choices have had their calculator out. They reckon that just £15 can buy 3Gb worth of data download – around 2000 emails or three full length movies. Not a bad deal.

For £15, you could get 3Gb of downloads on the Orange and O2 mobile networks. Or 5GB from the network operator “three”. Three, T-mobile and O2 also offer strict pay as you go mobile broadband deals.

For further information;

Visit the Orange website (or the Orange product page)

Visit the O2 website (or the O2 product page)

Visit the Three website (or the Three product page)

Visit the T-mobile (or the T-mobile product page)

Visit the Broadband Choices website