Dongles Are Great ... Until You Go Abroad

Oh dear. Just when you thought you had figured out what was happening in the mobile world, along comes another disruptive technology that upsets your prejudices. Welcome to dongles. No one seems to know the origin of the word, but we are seeing more and more of them sticking out of the side of laptops, each housing a tiny modem giving high-speed access to 3G mobile networks. They have been around for years as expensive executive toys, but suddenly they have become one of the fastest-growing services anywhere. During the past 10 months, mobile broadband has gone from almost nothing to 15% of broadband sales recorded by the comparison site Top 10 Broadband, which appears to be typical of similar sites; at this rate it could be more than 50% by 2010, or even by next year.

Why is it happening now? Thanks to collapsing prices, fierce competition and huge improvements in efficiency, mobile donglers can get broadband speeds of up to 7.2MB a second (though more usually around 3.6MB) for £10 to £15 a month on top of a normal monthly rental. The way things are going, it could, as Jessica McArdle at Top 10 observes, be offered "free" bundled into your monthly rental. A typical £15 monthly package, she says, is "65% cheaper, four times faster and three times more inclusive in terms of download allowance than its £45 equivalent two years ago". For instance, 3's £15-a-month yearly contract offers almost 3GB of downloads at speeds of "up to" 2.8MB. If you type your postcode into top10-broadband.co.uk, you can see what broadband speed is available with a map showing your nearest exchange.

It is a no-brainer for business users. Why pay up to £20 a day for broadband access in a hotel or at hotspots when you can get it for £15 or less a month with a dongled laptop? But it doesn't end there. If you have fast broadband from your laptop wherever you are (subject to network coverage) then you might question the need to pay for broadband access at home, particularly if you are a sole user.

Suddenly, the digital nirvana of having a nationwide Wi-Fi network offering fast broadband access to all may seem less attractive. If everyone can get fast broadband from their laptops, why bother to build a nationwide Wi-Fi network except to reach the small number of people without a 3G signal? The next generation of Wi-Fi networks promise speeds of up to 20MB a second but the 3G mobile broadband protagonists claim they will offer comparable speeds when standards are adopted to boost the efficiency of spectrum.

Is there a catch? Of course. I was about to become a dongler to avoid having to go to the tourist office in France every day on our holidays to check emails etc at £3 an hour. I tried Vodafone first. The desk adviser told me it would cost an extra £10 a day even before very high data charges (ie £210 for a three-week holiday). Bye-bye, Vodafone. I then asked my existing provider, O2, whether it had a daily charge. The good news was that it didn't. The bad news was that their roaming charges cost £3 for each megabyte of data in Europe (actually less than Vodafone but still stupidly high). A few days before, I had uploaded a 200MB video file from my digital camera to YouTube. As I used a wireless connection at home, it cost nothing. If I had done it as part of a package with a 3GB limit it would have made a minor dent in my allowance. But in Europe on O2's data charges it would have cost £600. Bye-bye, O2.

The moral of this is that mobile broadband could be a really good deal for active users in Britain but until the mobile networks - and they are all the same - start treating us like human beings instead of milch cows, it is best to seek out alternative solutions in Europe - such as cheap or free Wi-Fi hotspots.vic.keegan@guardian.co.uk