T-Mobile's data dongle declared best in UK tests

Congratulations to the data team at T-Mobile UK who have been named Dongle on The Move Winner in the Broadband Genie Road Trip 2010 Awards.

The chaps over at Broadband Genie took USB dongles from each of the major UK networks and tested them out during a two-day 350 mile road trip. They then subjected the dongles to a series of real-world tests (podcast downloads, youtube/spotify streaming and so on).

T-Mobile came out top in the download speed test — knocking back a top speed of over 3Mb. Nifty. This score led T-Mobile to trounce the competition on average across the other tests. I’m pleased to see Vodafone ranked reasonably well in most of the tests but managed only a miserable 0.3Mb upload top speed compared to 3UK’s shocking 1.6Mb top speed.

You can read the full analysis on the Broadband Genie post.

If you’re on the hunt, T-Mobile will give you a Mobile Broadband USB dongle for £8.99 plus a tenner top-up. Data will cost you £2 per day, £7 for the week and £15 for the month. Entirely reasonable. Plus, for the month of April, if you do a £2 top up, you’ll get 30 days free data.

Goodness me the cost of broadband has come down quite substantially hasn’t it? If you’d like to pay monthly, T-Mobile will give you a free dongle and unlimited (3GB fair use) data for a tenner a month (for the first 3 months) then £15/month.

I’m still turned on — in a geeky way — by 3UK’s PAYG MiFi deal. £69.99 buys you the MiFi unit bundled with 3GB of data usage valid for 3 months. Again, that looks very reasonable to me.

MiFi makes a heck of a lot of sense to me. I’ve been using this Novatel MiFi unit I was given to test for ages and it is a simply fantastic experience. I love the fact that more than one device can connect to it — and that I don’t have to mess around with connection screens and software installations. Just press the ‘on’ button and your devices are ready to connect.