3 Offers 15GB Mobile Broadband Allowance For £15

Whilst I do commend 3 for pushing the envelop of the selfish, money grabbing, dumb pipe companies ...You'd have to be completely stark raving bonkers to sign a 2 year contract with the pace at which this industry is moving. (unless your company is footing the bill)

In 6-8 months time they'll be better deals out there with better network coverage and faster, more advanced technology. And in 2 years time...well, only Mr. Jobs knows what! A 1 year contract tie-in is bad enough but 2 is stupidity at this stage.

I also don't see this as a good deal at all - merely another way of ripping the public off over an extended period of time. I currently have 'unlimited'* HSDPA web access provided to me by O2 for the sum of £7.50 p/m as a bolt-on. (+VAT)

I regularly use my phone, either through a usb cable connection or through bluetooth, with my netbook to access the net whilst on the move and I often surf the web on my phone's browser, get emails, attachments send photo's etc...all for £7.50 pm - and I'm sure there's a bit of profit in there for O2!

I know that some people will want to use the dongle and mobile network as their sole form of connection to the net for which, I think a 1 year contract with the prices outlined would be acceptable, ie. 15GB for £15 p/m. (including free dongle or heavily discounted to near cost)

BUT, the sector of the industry which is IMO going to grow just as fast is data SIMs only. SIM cards you can purchase to plug into a growing list of devices (without the need for phone numbers) in order to gain access to the internet on the move. Devices that have inbuilt modems; PMP's, laptops, netbooks, cars & existing phones that you might just want to use for data, web and email.

To this extent I'd love to see data only SIMS introduced quickly and at a reasonable price. If I can get 'unlimited' 8Mbs broadband at home on ADSL for under a tenner a month, I don't see why we can't have 3.5-7.2Mbs HSDPA data only cards on 12 month contracts (or PAYG) for around the same price.

Happy to be corrected, but timple I think this is the case already. I'm on 3 and I've noticed when I am out of range of a 3G tower I can still surf on my phone. I use Opera mobile as a browser, funnily enough I can use a permanent socks connection to Opera via 2G (and hence I assume O2) whereas for a 3G signal I need to tell Opera to use multiple HTTP connections. It seems O2 networking firewalling is a little more relaxed. Anyway, this is with the £5 bolt on to a monthly contract so apologies if things are different on PAYG etc. Cheers.

@Crash Biker - I've got a Nokia series 60 phone and whenever I go onto the 2G network the data stops. I've only got the 10MB £2.50 bolt on (mostly use it for following sport on the bbc mobile site) so perhaps that's the difference but when I tried the customer services they simply told me that data services don't work when on the 2G network.....