Three UK Trial “Home Mobile Broadband” Service in Northern Ireland

Mobile operator Three UK has announced that consumers in Northern Ireland will be the first to trial their new “Home Mobile Broadband” service, which really just sounds like a normal 3G / 4G data tariff with a bigger usage allowance (up to 40 GigaBytes).

The new product, which is also being described as a “home Wi-Fi ‘plug and play’ service“, is targeted at renters, students and “people who have little need for a landline telephone service“. Apparently customers will get a free 3G / 4G mobile WiFi router and can choose from either a 20GB or 40GB allowance for £17 or £20 per month respectively (30 day or 12 month contract).

Sadly only 500 devices have been made available for the trial, which can also only be taken via one of Three UK’s high street stores. The reason for the trial is largely just to test the impact of their new packages upon the network (congestion risk etc.).

Tom Malleschitz, Three’s Chief Marketing Officer, said:

“Our home broadband service offers an alternative to a costly fixed-line service which many consumers have no need for. Best of all, its super-simple – consumers can just plug and play with no need for complex installation.”

Overall the setup doesn’t sound very different from buying your own mobile WiFi (MiFi) style router and simply plugging in a normal data SIM, which is what some people already do. Similarly EE will give you a data SIM with 15GB for £20 per month or 25GB for £30, although in that sense Three UK are at least cheaper and do a much bigger 40GB allowance.

According to Ookla’s 3G speedtest data for December 2015, average Mobile Broadband speeds in Northern Ireland for Three UK reached 9.9Mbps and you can probably double that for the smaller areas where 4G is currently available. But obviously this is not going to be such a good experience in areas of weak signal.

It’s worth pointing out that while 40GB might have been a good usage allowance to have five years ago, today most real fixed line home broadband packages tend to come with significantly bigger allowances and all of the largest ISPs can give you “unlimited” usage.

Likewise service quality and stability is more predictable on a fixed line than via mobile and students are perhaps more likely to make aggressive use of video streaming services (they’d easily chew through 40GB in the space of a few days or less).