Mobile Broadband On A Stick - Vodafone Joins The Herd

Today Vodafone has announced that it’s offering mobile broadband in a USB stick format, much like the one Three launched a few months ago. The biggest surprise though is that it’s actually fairly competitively priced.

If you’re a Vodafone voice customer, you can get the stick for free over 24 months on a $39.95 contract, which includes 5GB of data, or you can get 1GB of data per month for $19.95 plus $5 a month for the stick. Alternatively, if you don’t have a Vodafone voice account, you can get 5GB for $49.95 or 1GB for $29.95.

That’s not too much more expensive than Three’s offering, especially if your phone’s already with Voda. And the benefit of Vodafone over Three is the increased coverage - when you drift off their 3.5G network, you’ll drop onto their 2G network, which won’t cost you roaming dollars like Three does (they use Telstra’s 2G network, which costs an obscene amount for super-slow internet access on the go).

Of course, as Gus at Lifehacker has found, Vodafone do sometimes get confused by their own terms of service, so you should make sure that you read the contract twice before you sign.

[Vodafone]