Mobile Phone retailer Carphone Warehouse has begun trialling ‘Unlimited Mobile Broadband’ packages on their own Talkmobile network.
Talkmobile is Carphone Warehouse’s own network, which is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), ‘Piggybacking’ on the Vodafone network.
Customers who sign up to the trial with Talkmobile will receive unlimited internet access for their smartphones, on a 24 month contract basis. Contracts start at £12 per month, and rise to the top end tariffs such as the iPhone 4 deals.
The trial has been dubbed ‘Never Pay for the Internet’, with signups running between 6 April and 4 May. Of course, technically you would be paying for the internet as a part of your monthly bill, but you won’t be paying extra for any usage above a capped limit of say, 500MB.
Prior to the trial being announced, UK customers could only get truly unlimited mobile data through the operator Three, as a part of their ‘One Plan’. On a contract basis, the One Plan would cost you £25, so CPW are aiming to undercut this by offering Unlimited Data with even their cheapest monthly deals.
Carphone Warehouse’s UK trading director Mark Eastham confirmed in a press release that the ‘Never Pay for the Internet’ trial could be used with any one of 30 smartphones sold in store.
“We wanted to offer customers a catch-free data tariff and we’re really looking forward to seeing the results of this trial,” Eastham said in a statement. “There’s no small print or fair usage policy so when we say unlimited internet access we really mean it.”
We’re all for unlimited data packages, especially ones inclusive of the monthly tariff. However, it is currently unclear as to whether CPW will put a ‘fair usage’ cap on their unlimited data deals. Three have been the first UK network to offer truly unlimited data with no fair usage cap, will CPW and Talkmobile follow suit?
What are your thoughts on Unlimited Mobile Broadband? Should all UK networks follow suit? We’d love to hear from you, so let us know via Twitter.