Pay per use mobile broadband option prepared by T-Mobile

The offering of a new range of Pay Per Use (PPU) style mobile broadband packages have been hinted at recently by Richard Warmsley, the head of Mobile Internet and Entertainment at T-Mobile UK.

This new PPU option will offer the purchase of a USB Modem (Dongle) by the customer and the ability to only pay when they want to use it, unlike the current Pay As You Go (PAYG) packages. An expiry after a certain period of time usually comes with PAYG packages by comparison.

The promotion of such a service is currently only offered by the UK mobile operator Vodafone with its TopUp and Go range, which charges a one-off fee of £39 for 1GB of use that doesn’t expire and a bundled USB Modem. The charge for an extra 1GB of data allowance, however, is a fairly steep £15 although this cost is often outweighed by the flexibility this option brings.

In a statement Warmsley said “This year we will shift into pay-per-day/week/month options for new customers. This will give the mass market a chance to try mobile broadband. They can purchase their dongle and pay for usage as and when they need it. 1-2Mbps is typical on our network, 2-3Mbps is achievable, and you can get 4.5Mb in bigger cities, depending on the circumstances.”

A mixture of PPU packages comprising of day, week and month are understood to be planned by T-Mobile and new Mobile Broadband data bundles for users of mobile phones, which instead of using quantities like Megabytes and GigaBytes would be likely to be charged by “minutes” of use, are also being investigated.

Whether the flexible Fair Usage Policy (FUP), which slows the service down instead of charging users for exceeding their data limit, will be retained with the new PPU has not been made clear yet. It is, however, unlikely that it would want its data services accessed for free, which would mean that this option would probably conflict with a no-contract PPU service.