Since 2003, my mobile phone operator has been T-Mobile and throughout this period my needs have changed. Over the past 2 years, I’ve needed a data connection much more and until yesterday I continued to use GPRS but today I set my first 3G phone. Whilst at my house I’m lucky to get a UMTS signal, I enjoyed listening to last.fm in the car to a nearby small city.
I thought accessing fairly high quality streaming audio would cost me a small fortune but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that 3G data, like GPRS, is capped at £1 a day (and that’s on PAYG!). I downloaded an amount well in excess of 5MB and whilst this doesn’t sound much it was really convenient.
The beauty of it is that I can use my phone as a modem so I can get speeds between dial-up and broadband in some places and speeds roughly equal to dial-up (GPRS) pretty much anywhere for £1 a day which in my opinion is much better than paying whatever extortionate amount commercial WiFi networks demand!
On my current price plan I pay only 3p per text (this weekend I receive free texts as if you to your phone up on a Friday for an amount over £10, T-Mobile give you free weekend texts) and no more than £1 daily for data. Considering I’m not a big fan of traditional telephony I don’t object to being charged 40p/min for the occasional time where I might use the ‘phone’ aspect. 
What’s your favourite phone network and why?
Mobile phone networks seem so varied in experience from person to person. For me they suck as currently I’m trying to leave them and they want nearly £400 for me to leave them. Problems seem to always occur with mobile networks when you try and leave them.
I think the jury is still out on the point of WiFi on mobile phones. The quiconnect and truphone partnership looks to have some potential. At the moment I’m much more inclined to buy a phone with HSPDA than WiFi.
T-Mobile at present are the only provider that lets up load video directly to You Tube from your phone so they score points with me as well.