I’m about to move into rented accommodation for work. I work away from home and this is cheaper than hotels. Ill be there for 3 or 4 nights a week – more during school holidays when wife & children will come to stay too.

Am I better off signing up to a phone & broadband deal or is the performance of a dongle good enough? Phone signal is pretty good in the area.

Ta.

I wasn’t impressed with my dongle. A complete faff is what it was!

Dongle is ok if you are close to the mast and you are a light user. If you are battering xhamster on a daily basis then a wired connection may be the way forward.

If the signal is good what you need to find out about is the contention, but thats pretty much on a suck it and see basis. I’ve found anywhere close to an office based working population – regardless of how good the signal is for calls – 3G/internet is woeful. The network is clogged with shirking office workers facebooking and tweeting from their phones on the sly. Come 6pm and it can the network functions much better though. Residentially, especially if you are somewhere a bit rent/studenty/night-lifey it can be the other way around and the network is slower in the evenings but better in the day.

You can get a dongle, usually with some PAYG credit on it, for £10-£20 from the supermarket, you just need to try it and see really

What is the signal coverage?
How much do you use?

I can do most things in a HSDPA signal that I need to, but it can get expensive if you go over your limits.

I was somewhere short term and did a plusnet month by month plan which worked out OK.

If you do go down the dongle route you might need a long USB extension to get it in the best spot.

Thanks folks. Use is mainly in the evening in a little market town in the north west but would like to use iplayer etc.

HSDPA coverage seems to be okay but drops slightly indoors.

I’ll check out the plusnet jobbie and invest £20 in a dongle to give it a whirl.

but would like to use iplayer etc.

You’ll run out of data allowance pretty quickly with a dongle in that case

Cheap android phone and virgin media VIP sim for £15 a month rolling with unlimited internet.

Unlimited* or Unlimited?
As above iplayer is not easy on the usage. Either use iplayer DL at home and the dongle to authenticate or look at a wired package.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/diagnostics This is also a half decent speed checker

Get a monthly data tethering plan for your mobile (assuming some sort of mildly smart phone) and use that. If it doesn’t work out cancel the monthly extra and get wired service, if it does work, well, it works!