Confabulations

I have both my home internet connection and phone with 3. After trying 3 different providers over the course of 2 years to get broadband at home following my move, I plumped for the dongle option and it’s pretty sweet. So sweet that I recently upgraded to a 5gb download limit each month for just £7.50. The connection might be occasionally shunky, but it works and is plenty fast enough for what I use it for (email, facebook etc, some tiny freelance projects, banking and – ahem – ‘other’). So – for a nominal fee I get pretty decent internet use.

The technology behind a ‘dongle’ is, in case you don’t know, the 3G network. It’s a telephony protocol that also can carry data. That’s the stuff behind the whole “catch up with your work emails on your phone” thing that everyone’s so thrilled with the prospect of. Anyway, inside your dongle you’ve got a SIM card, like a normal phone and this is what handles your data connection stuff.

Great.

So riddle me this, 3: if the technology in my dongle is the same as the technology in my phone, and I can have 5gb for £7.50 on my PC, why will that same £7.50 get me about 4 Facebook status updates and a quick peruse of the news on my mobile. It’s pisstaking on a grand scale. I’d use my phone for internet waaayy more than I do were the prices even slightly more in kilter. The stupid thing is that 3 are constantly trying to get me to use it more – every time I login there’s a new application, video thing or Whatever they’d like me to try. At £48 per gig, they can cram it, frankly.