Charles Dunstone, CEO of The Carphone Warehouse ( TalkTalk ), claims that sales of Mobile Broadband services have peaked and many customers are now believed to be heading back to the sanctuary of fixed land-line broadband connections instead. Growing dissatisfaction with poor speeds and limited coverage take most of the blame, although that's hardly surprising when most operators raise expectations to almost ridiculous levels.


Frustratingly Dunstone does not reveal any statistics to support his claim and every other piece of research we've seen has appeared to communicate the opposite conclusion. Similarly the idea that Mobile Broadand is somehow suddenly becoming a "supplementary rather than a substitutional" service is not new; it's always been positioned that way.

Dunstone also touches on the growing popularity of free Wi-Fi, although while this might be true in major cities like London, it does not hold much water once you start venturing outside of those locations. The only free Wi-Fi outside of city centres that we see usually comes from unsecured personal networks.

Still, much as stated in our opening paragraph and other recent articles (check this out), the current generation of Mobile Broadband technology remains deeply flawed. This situation is continually frustrated by mobile operators that fail to give consumers a realistic expectation of true service quality, which can be far slower than the advertised rate; not to mention unreliable too.

The next generation of Mobile Broadband technology – known as Long Term Evolution ( LTE ) – will put right many of this generations mistakes. Sadly you will have to wait another year or two before LTE finds its feet in the UK and until then the situation is unlikely to see a drastic improvement.