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?
