I spend a lot of time one way or another using mobile broadband services on my PC, and there are some pretty evident trends. Services continue to get cheaper even as speed and coverage range expands, to the point where it's almost realistic to contemplate using a 3G service as your only means of connection, provided you've done the appropriate research into coverage and price.

The biggest restriction is neither of these things, but the software. It does the job, just about, but not a day passes when I'm reliant on a mobile broadband connection when I don't experience a number of software bugs. Indeed, I'd argue that the client software for mobile broadband under Windows is the buggiest pile of rubbish being foisted on paying customers anywhere in the software spectrum. (The issue of Linux and Mac clients I'll leave for another time.)

Failure to connect, unexpected dropouts, inability to cope with those dropouts, random crashes, inability to recognise their own devices, and the ability to mangle your other connections at the same time are par for the course. That applies to all four major network providers on the market, and I doubt that the impending merger of Vodafone and 3 will change matters. (Getting Vodafone's software working on my Vista machine last year quite literally took months.)

What might improve matters is a fundamental structural change which is being introduced in Windows 7. As Microsoft tells it, one of the big problems with mobile broadband software is that it has to interface with a bunch of networking stuff which is probably better handled within Windows itself. There's a fair bit of merit in that argument -- I can remember the pre-Windows 95 days when you had to install your own TCP/IP stack to get Net connectivity, and that was normally an ugly scenario as well.

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