Bring your netbook to life

Do you want a free internet stick for your netbook that you can use for the first three months without paying a thing?

Get your netbook online the internet no matter where you are with Vodafone’s great offer of a Free 3G USB Modem and pay nothing at all for the first three months (and thereafter just £15 including 3GB of usage, allowng to check your mails, chat and surf the web anytime, anywhere.

Finally the price of mobile broadband is realistic for the average man on the street (and more than reasonable for women too!) that netbooks finally can come to life and become really useful outside of Starbucks too!

For more information and to get your free internet stick click here…

In the case of the Free Dell Mini 9 offer from Vodafone, its not a normal mobile phone tariff that you are signing up to, but a mobile broadband contract. As long as you sign up, you get a netbook for free.

A Dell Mini 9, when you buy it from Dell costs £199. For this you get the netbook. Nothing more, nothing less. If you are thinking about being connected to the Internet when you’re not at home – you can use Wifi. Lots of places offer wifi (wireless LAN) connections when you are on the move, either for free or for a small price. If this is all you’ll ever want and need, you’ll be better off just buying the netbook outright, rather than signing up to a mobile broadband contract.

If you need more than this that you’ll be needing a Mobile Broadband USB stick, available from all the mobile operators, which you can have either on a contract, or with a ‘pay as you go’ arrangement. This will get you connected via the mobile network when wifi is not available (like on a train, or away from the city centre).

So which is better?

• Buy the netbook outright and arrange your mobile broadband yourself
• Get a free netbook from Vodafone and sign the contract

For simple calculations, lets assume that you will use mobile broadband for two thirds of the month (lets call it twenty days a month), and on average you will use it for one hour on each of those twenty days for general web-browising, e-mails etc., but you are not normally going to do big downloads.

To keep it easy, we’ll only look at Vodafone, but of course other mobile phone operators are available (but you won’t find big price differences).

There are three options:-

Buy the Dell Mini 9 yourself and add a Pay-as-you-Go Mobile Broadband USB Stick

So here the netbook will cost you (as mentioned before ) £199. On top of this a ‘Pay-as-you-Go style USB mobile broadband stick will set you back a measly £39, which includes the first 1GB of data (Vodafone have in their advertising assumed that this is enough for 30 hours web-browsing). Subsequent 1GB top-ups cost £15. Using out earlier estimates, that means that you will have top up after 6 weeks (about 9 times per year)

Let’s do the math:

• First  Year Costs: £199 + £39 + (9 x £15) = £373
• Subsequent Yearly Costs: 9 x £15 = £135
• Total cost for three years = £643 or about 59p per day
  

Buy the Dell Mini 9 yourself and add a Mobile Broadband USB Stick with a contract

Here again, you need to fork out £199 up front, and then sign a contract with Vodafone (or someone else) for the mobile broadband. If you sign a 12-month contract, Vodafone will happily give you the USB stick for free. Again using our earlier estimates about your usage, it would make sense to go for the cheapest plan, which includes 3GB per month, for £15.

This comes out at:

• First Year Costs: £199 + (12 x £15) = £379
• Subsequent Yearly Costs:  12 x £15 = £180
• Total cost for three years = £739 or about 67p per day

Get the Dell Mini 9 for Free by signing a conract for mobile broadband

The advantage here is that you don’t have to fork out £199 for the netbook. Everything is included in the monthly plan. Same usage assumptions again of course. For a 1GB per month plan

Here the costs are:

• First Year Costs: 12 x £20 = £240
• Subsequent Yearly Costs:  12 x £20 = £240
• Total cost for three years = £720 or about 66p per day

Summary

Interesting eh? The free netbook turned out not to be the cheapest over three years. Also, with the free netbook, you are committed to the ongoing costs for two years, where as with the pay-as-you-go option, you were not committed at all.

Of course, in different situations, the benefits and drawbacks change. If you were to do a lot of downloading from time to time, the pay-as-you-go option may end up costing more. Before jumping into a free netbook deal though, we really recommend to do the calculations based on how much you think you will use mobile broadband and see if it is really good option for you.

Next steps: Compare netbook prices or buy a netbook

This is what they do right now, and have been doing for years, if people take free or subsidised mobile phones and then ‘do-a-runner’ with them, or reports them as stolen when they are not. They can, through the mobile network send a deactivion or ‘kill’ signal to them, rendering them completely useless even on other networks.

These days, mobile operators are all keen to give away free (or very low cost) netbooks to anyone who is prepared to sign up to a mobile broadband contract. This makes the overall price quite attractive.

Right now though, there is no way to do the same thing for netbooks, so they are taking a risk given them away. While most people wouldn’t dream of doing it, there’s always some that would. This just costs money for the good guys who end up subsidising the bad guys.

Mobile networks are, as a result investigating ways that this could be done in the near future. If such a system is developed, netbooks could be renedered completely useless in the same way.

All T-Mobile monthly mobile broadband plans now include unlimited Wifi access via all UK T-Mobile Hotspots. This means that you can get online with no extra cost at over 20,000 locations throughout the UK.

T-Mobile monthly mobile broadband plans start at at just £15 per month (and even cheaper for the first three months) for upto 3GB of use. A free Mobile Broadband USB Stick 530 is included, ideal for plugging into your netbook.

Mobile Broadband coverage can be checked here and the T-Mobile UK Hotspot Finder can be found here.