What's happened recently in the UK market for Internet Service Providers ( ISPs) is that competition has forced down prices so the best broadband deals are changing from month to month. Therefore it's not as simple as just grabbing the cheapest at any one particular time. Once you've opted for any one particular broadband deal you find a lot of reluctance to keep switching. There are horror stories of people who end up paying two providers at once, or have to go without any access at all for weeks on end. Sometimes even months. On the other hand it can be galling to be stuck with a legacy pricing plan when you know that it should be possible to have exactly the same service for a much lower monthly charge, or maybe even a faster one.

One of the features of broadband deals in the UK is a tendency to obfuscate the information that you need to make the best decision about which plan offers the best value. For example one might come with a low fixed monthly charge but then have a low cap for bandwidth, after which the cost of extra gigabytes may be more than if you had started off with a more expensive plan in the first place. But the cap and the charge bands will vary from one provider to the next so that it's difficult to compare between the lot of them. At this point you really have to take a hard look at what you require in terms of internet usage, telephone calls and possibly cable or satellite TV as well. No wonder so many of us give up and just take a recomendation from the man in the pub!

One area that is developing rapidly but as yet cannot be recommended for serious broadband use is the field of so called mobile Broadband. These services are generally delivered via a USB dongle, which is a hardware device that receives wireless telephone connections, a bit like a mobile phone, but at a faster speed - suppose to be up to 3Gigabits per secons although in practice one can rarely acheive such speeds. In fact in most areas, the connection will frequently drop back to a 2G or ordinary mobile phone type connection. In addition, the pricing schemes for mobile broadband come with severe bandwidth restrictions such that are only really any good for occasional use. If you try to work online using mobile broadband you soon get capped and within a week or two the dongle will become useless so don't think that with the tarrifs for pay as you go at £15 a month this might be able to replace landline best broadband deals, they won't anytime soon.

Maybe the market will develop at some point though, because the technology is kind of there already to allow a broadbandish internet connection that is not tied to a landline, there just doesn't seem to be enough infrastructure in place behind it yet.