O2 mobile broadband gets cheaper, with shorter contracts and free months - so what's the catch?

It's always nice to get some good tariff and deal news from a mobile broadband supplier, but when three come along at once its bound to arouse suspicion. So what exactly has O2 Mobile Broadband got in store for its customers?

At first glance, it looks like great news - and for many people, that's exactly what it is. Firstly, it has cut out 24-month contracts for everything except laptop deals. This is welcome, as in an industry that changes as fast as broadband its unwise to sign up for something that long - unless you're getting a sexy new laptop into the deal, of course.

Next, to make the 18-month deals more appealing, O2 is offering three months for free on its 18-month dongle deals. Again, no complaints here - if you're happy with an 18-month deal this makes O2 an even more appealing option than it already was, essentially giving you close to 20 per cent of your contract for nothing.

And finally, it has reduced its 'overage' charge to 2.4p per MB - again, it's hard to look at a reduction in price as anything but a good thing.  So how has O2 managed all this without impacting on its profits? Well, that's the clever part: in the same announcement, it revealed "there will no longer be 10GB tariffs, as O2 want to encourage light-medium users". No wonder the overage price has been reduced - it seems a lot of people may be needing it in the future.

I'm not using this as a stick to beat O2 with: in truth, only Orange Mobile Broadband (10GB) and 3 Mobile Broadband (15GB) still offer deals of 10GB or more. But doesn't it strike you as odd that, as a technology allegedly improves and the internet becomes more bandwidth hungry, deal download limits are going down, not up?

While there are a lot of people out there that love their iPhone, there is an increasingly large amount of the population that should be loathing them - mainly O2 dongle users. Because in its rush to pander to the Apple crowd, giving away 'all you can eat' data deals to smartphone users on mobile contracts, the mobile broadband provider has hit the wall in terms of data capacity.

The same is happening to the others too. As they fight for customers in the mobile broadband market, both with smartphones and laptops, their network improvements are struggling to keep up. It's hardly surprising - in a relatively short amount of time we've gone from using the net to read email and look at largely text driven websites, to streaming live HD video content and downloading massive files and updates. Something had to give.

So a 5GB monthly download limit, with 2.4p per MB on top, wouldn't have sounded like much to me 10 years ago. It's a rather different story now though. Streaming one hour of HD television from a service such as the BBC iPlayer, for example, can use up 500MB; so you're looking at 10 hours per month before you have to start spending £12 per hour for any more - quite sobering.

Then again, we've always said that mobile broadband should still be seen as the perfect back-up to a main fixed-line broadband connection, a great travel companion, or an ideal choice for lighter users who can get a good signal at home. But for now at least, it is a long way from fulfilling its much talked of potential for replacing everyone's fixed-line broadband solution.