Last week Carphone Warehouse announced plans to demerger its telecom and retail interests with Talk Talk due to be listed as an independent company on the stock market on 29th March.

Two new holding companies will be created The New Carphone Warehouse and Talk Talk, who will concentrate on the fixed line voice and broadband telecommunications business

Carphone Warehouse Chair Charles Dunstone will hold the same position with Talk Talk and the New Carphone Warehouse, with Dido Harding, who will be joining the TalkTalk group prior to the completion of the demerger process-going to take on the role of CEO at Talk Talk.

Talk Talk will launch a mobile service before the end of the year and are also thought to be in line to become a TV operator sometime in 2011. They have already been involved in a project to launch an internet-connected TV set-top box before the end of 2010. They have been involved in Project Canvas as part of a consortium with the BBC and others and the project look set for completion soon.

Charles Dunstone said no final decisions had been reached about Talk Talk’s TV service. But he added: “We need to be able to deliver TV to people, and we need a platform to do that. I think Canvas is a really interesting opportunity for us.”

On the mobile front it seems logical that Talk Talk will try and seal a wholesale deal with one of the larger network operators like Vodafone, or Orange to use their wireless networks and supports as this would keep costs down.

As most of Talk Talk’s likely rivals like BT, Virgin Media and BskyB all sell Broadband, TV and Phone services bundled in special deals as well as individually we can expect Talk Talk to follow suit. They will start by trying to sell their new mobile services to their existing 4.2million broadband subscribers as there is a ready market for them there and it makes sense target this group of existing happy customers initially.

It’s also possible Talk Talk will try and offer mobile broadband on the new Apple iPad. Talk Talk have praised the device with Chief Executive of Carphone Warehouse Andrew Harrison saying they were really excited about the new tablet device. He added that smartphones had already started to dominate the market after the iPhone made the breakthrough and the tablet device could be next to land a share of the market.

Mr Harrison said, “Apple has the best track record in doing this as we have previously seen with both the iPod and iPhone.”

With rivals like 02 and Orange making no immediate decision whether they will offer mobile broadband on the iPad, this could give Talk Talk a march on their rivals and a good product with which to reintroduce themselves back into the market in April.

A survey run by Cambridge based comparison website Broadbandgenie.co.uk has revealed that UK mobile broadband buyers are more inclined to purchase mobile broadband packages that offer free gifts of some sort as part of the deal.

The survey asked more than 1000 people “What would most affect your mobile broadband purchase’ nearly one third of the respondents said added extras like free games consoles, digital cameras etc would have a significant effect on their decision.

We’re pretty surprised by this as we would have thought the main concerns would have been speed, reliability and cost of the package. It seems that many people don’t really care about these things as long as they feel they are getting” something for nothing” by getting free gifts.

Only 25% of people in the survey said fast speeds were their number one priority, while only 20% put low prices as the main factor in their decision to purchase mobile broadband.

Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised with these findings as it is likely a lot of people surveyed will be owners of mobile phones where it has become commonplace to offer incentives like laptops and free dongles for signing up to contracts. It appears that consumers are assuming that because mobile broadband is offered by the same and networks like Orange, Vodafone and others then similar deals should be on offer.

Broadband Genie editor Chris Marling said: “These results are very interesting and may surprise, and frustrate, the UK’s mobile broadband suppliers.

The desire for added extras is a hangover from the mobile companies’ insistence on giving away everything from free handsets to games consoles with mobile phone tariffs – consumers know dongles come from the same firms, and want more freebies.

“There has been resistance to continuing laptop deals from some mobile broadband suppliers, but the demand for them is still high.

Mobile broadband suppliers usually try and give the customers what they want, but in the UK mobile broadband prices are already cheaper than in other parts of Europe, so they have been resisting giving away other freebies.

That does appear to be changing as some deals are now appearing, for instance O2 have scrapped their one off connection fee and are offering mobile broadband with a free Asus 1005H or Samsung R519 laptop on a 2 year contract for £25 a month.

Mobile operator 3 has a MiFi deal that includes a bundled iPod Touch on a two-year contract for an extra £6 per week. Business deals are also emerging with Vodafone cutting prices on mobile broadband packages for businesses with a monthly plan of £15 offering 3Gb of data and added extras including antivirus and spyware protection.

So maybe the British public will get what they want after all, although to be honest we would be happy with full UK coverage and faster speeds.

Considering how they dominate the retail food sector we shouldn’t really be too surprised at the growth that Tesco Mobile has shown during the past year. Customers signing up to the supermarket giant’s mobile division have increased by more than ten percent, with signs of increasing growth likely again in 2010.

Strong handset sales in the lead up to Christmas and over the New Year period have pushed Tesco Mobile’s customer base to over 2 million. The company say that on Christmas day one Tesco customer was activating a new handset every two seconds, which is a pretty impressive statistic.

The convenience of being able to buy mobile phones and accessories while shopping for groceries has obviously captured the imagination of the public and we’re not too surprised to see Tesco Mobile grow at such a rate.

Strong trading up to and over Christmas will have been helped by the iPhone being sold in their online stores and in phone shops in-store as well. The iPhone still remains extremely popular and is a great seller and with Tesco offering it at very competitive prices.

Mobile phone accessories were another area where Tesco Mobile saw a big increase in sales. They were up by nearly 20% year on year as customers sought out gifts and stocking fillers for friends and family who are mobile users. Tesco sold 10,000 memory cards and over 5000 dongles for mobile broadband use in the week before Christmas.

A rather surprising top seller in the lead up to Christmas was one of their budget phones, the Sim free VX1i Party Phone. This mini mobile phone-which is the size of a credit card-sold over 10,000 units in the two weeks before Christmas and sold well over the New Year period too. It seems many partygoers were willing to pay £18.99 for a handset like this to use over the festive period, rather than risk taking their more expensive mobiles and losing them.

Speaking about their sales and increase in customers a Tesco spokesman said, “Our 100 Tesco Phone Shops have been key to this success, helping customers find the right mobile for their needs and offering consumers choice, convenience and a non-pressured sales environment.”

Tesco plan to add to the 100 phone shops they have already and expect to roll out another 100 during 2010. With expansion plans like that we can only see Tesco Mobile going from strength to strength.

New smartphones like the Apple iPhone are being blamed for putting a strain on the current 3G Network because of the huge amount of data users download to these phones. So with networks becoming busier and a new 4G network a little way off yet, operators are looking at other ways to ease the burden on networks.

Encouraging people to use WiFi hotspots instead of the existing 3G network would appear to be one way for operators to reduce demand on their networks and decrease the risk of outages that have started to trouble some operators- 02 being an example recently.

It makes sense to utilise hotspots as many smartphone users use broadband to access the internet and to download and upload data while on the move. Making people more aware of WiFi hotspots as an alternative to connecting through the 3G network seems an obvious short term move and looks to be the answer to the increase in traffic smartphones have brought.

In the UK there are currently around 10000 hotspots and there has already been a large increase in the volume of people using them. As hotspots become more popular the demand for them will increase and industry experts are already suggesting that by 2012 there could be around 30000 as interest in the mounts.

In the USA industry analysts reported WiFi usage increasing by more than five times last year mainly brought about by the volume of iPhone‘s and other smartphones being used. A three fold increase here in the UK over the next few years does look possible given these figures.

In the UK BT operate around 4000 public hotspots and traffic using them has doubled last year alone. BT Openzone WiFi has deals with some mobile carriers already. Mobile operator 02 has a deal in place that lets their iPhone customer’s use the Openzone network and Orange (another UK seller of the iPhone) have signed a deal with BT.

Owen Geddes, chief executive of WiFi company Freerunner said his company currently operate1,200 hotspots, but plans to increase that by 400 a month, with the target of reaching 10,000 within two years.

Freerunner and BE, a relatively new broadband internet provider who provide home ,business and mobile broadband have also announced plans to provide free community WiFi to 46 communities across the country including Residents Associations, Scout Groups and charities.

The next time you are out and about and looking to use your smartphone why not look for a WiFi hotspot to make a connection.

In a recent survey carried out by Opinium Research it was revealed that UK mobile users spend over seven hours a month on their phones. As if that wasn’t bad enough a staggering 68 hours a month is the average a Brit spends online every single month. .

The survey took a sample of 2000 UK adults in various age groups and found that a whopping 59% would feel as if they were cut off from the outside world if they did not have a mobile phone or their internet connection. It is obvious that in Britain we have fully embraced the technological advances in areas like smartphones with the iPhone in particular a big development that has seen the market full of smartphones from a variety of manufacturers.

In Britain mobile broadband has also taken off in a big way letting people access the internet on the move giving users plenty of flexibility in how they can get online. The Internet has become an everyday occurrence for people in the UK now and is seen as an integral part of every day life in Britain.

With millions of people using mobile phones and the internet it’s easy to see why around one third of all respondents who took the survey said they would not make contact as regularly with friends or family if they did not have mobile phones or the internet. Even more staggering was the fact that nearly 14% of people said they would have no idea how to keep in touch with their friends and family if they did not have internet or a mobile. Many respondents also said they would feel they were “Missing Out” on something if they couldn’t keep in contact by either going online or by mobile calls or texts.

Julie Owen a spokesperson for comparison site Moneysupermarket.com said, “Technology has developed so much over the last 10 years and the capabilities and functionality of phones and the internet have meant people are spending an increasing amount of time using them,”. She also added,

“Mobiles are no longer just used as phones and as a result people have become more and more dependent on them.”

The increased advances in mobile phone functionality have made them far more than just tools for making phone calls and there is an increasing need to use them more and more as they become part of our everyday lives.

Could you do without your Dongle? Is your Blackberry your best buddy? How would you cope if you had no mobile or internet access?

We would love to hear your views; why not let us know your opinion by leaving a comment below.

It looks like Orange are getting serious in the battle for fixed line broadband customers by raising speeds up to 20Mbps and giving their price plans an overhaul. Orange have seen their market share in the ultra competitive fixed line broadband market in the UK dwindle with the last official figures showing they had under 1million customers.

Orange have launched a new marketing campaign under the “No More Speeding Fines” tagline and are hoping this will bring back some of the customers they have lost to rivals like Talk Talk and others recently.

As well as announcing an increase in their broadband speeds Orange has also announced four new pricing plans. The Home Starter, Home Select, Home Max and Home Ultra, ranging from £6.50 to £13.50 per month. The cheapest plans will be available to its mobile phone customers on contract. The plans will also offer unlimited download usage, subject to the usual fair-usage terms and conditions.

Users who sign up to the Home Max and Home Ultra packages will have to take Orange’s own line rental at £10.50 per month, but they will get free evening and weekend landline calls, and mobile customers can also get a £3 a month discount on their broadband.

Asif Aziz, director of Broadband and Home for Orange, told The Times that although it will advertise speeds of up to 20Mbps, customers will be advised on what speed to expect before they sign up to the 18-month contracts. “Irrespective of where you live, you will get the fastest speed your line can handle,” he said, adding that customers would not be charged a premium to connect their house to the faster broadband service.

This news of new prices and speeds comes after the company confirmed the launch of a new unlimited business mobile broadband service.

The Product Director of Broadbandchoices.co.uk Michael Phillips said about the new deals, “While we welcome any increases in broadband speeds, Orange has not performed well in our recent customer satisfaction surveys, and has been losing customers for some time, so hopefully this speed boost will be the first step of many improvements.”

It’s likely that the new faster broadband speeds combined with the competitive prices will see them attract some new customers and combined with the fact they will be providing Apple’s iPhone on its network before Christmas, a rise in market share is likely.

Orange have already instigated a price war in the mobile broadband market and we feel their new price plans could see competitors revise their own and maybe we will see a fall in fixed line broadband prices.

So last week, telephone and broadband service provider TalkTalk released a peculiar report on what they call Digital Anthropology. Unsurprisingly it focuses on the internet and comes up with some interesting classifications of people who use the internet. Everything below is just a summary, so you can find out more or read the full report here.

The Categories (which they call Tribes!)

1. Digital Extroverts

1.5 million adults; 9.2%. Care about convergence of mobile technology and the internet (e.g. smartphones) and take the internet for granted as part of their daily routine with tasks like updating Facebook or Twitter.

2. Timid Technophobes

4 million adults; 23%. Less affected by technology than others. Use basic features of mobile phones and may use the internet to send and receive emails but only from a computer.

3. Social Secretaries

3.4 million adults; 19%. Busy people who use technology because of the utility factor. Use the internet for social interaction.

4. First Lifers

2.1 million adults; 12%. “Life is there to be lived”. Spend a lot of time outdoors, but may use technology related to that such as GPS.

5. E-ager Beavers

5.1 million adults; 29%. The largest group. Use the internet often during the day but it is less important a part of their life than Digital Extroverts.

6. Web Boomers

1.4 million adults; 8%. Use the internet for the vast quantities of data that are available, but are aware that not everything online is necessarily true.

Future Predictions

Perhaps more interesting (although only presented by TalkTalk in a concise form) are the predictions they make. These include an emergence of the digital elite from the Digital Extroverts group, as a new group of people paying for higher quality internet services. And also the replacement of the so-called “Digitally Excluded” with a new “Digital Refuseniks” group; meaning less people who don’t have access to the internet but a greater number of people who although they have access, simply choose not to use it.

TalkTalk’s website lets you complete survey to find out which group you belong to, although many of you probably already know. Here’s a video they posted on YouTube to introduce the report.

In a press release last week, BT announced that it has more than doubled the size of its FTTP (fibre to the premise) high speed broadband rollout.

Originally planned at one million households and businesses, BT will now offer the service with download speeds of up to 100Mb/s to 2.5 million locations, rising to 10 million by 2012.

Openreach, an arm of BT is the semi-independent company that is responsible for installing the technology, and providing the system to a range of broadband providers that use the BT network, not just to BT Broadband.

FTTP will use optical fiber instead of copper wire to connect premises to the local exchange. This so-called ‘last mile’ of data transfer is the one that minimises most internet connections. If BT can meet the announced targets, this will be a great benefit to business and home broadband users as well as a great cost benefit because it is said that Openreach can deliver to the extra 1.5 million households and businesses at no cost beyond the original £1.5 billion budget.

There are two trial sites that will first receive the new technology, Highams Park in London and Bradwell Abbey in Milton Keynes. This will serve only 20,000 premises but could be available as early as March 2010. What remains to be seen is how fast the actual internet connection is, because we know that advertised transfer rates are rarely the rates that users actually experience.

Over the last couple of years there has been a huge increase in the use of mobile broadband, but it now seem as if that trend is being reversed with many users now ditching their dongles and returning to fixed line broadband.

The upsurge in mobile broadband was helped by the cost of the service dropping dramatically in price as UK operators fought to secure customers. The price dropped from an initial £30 a month or more to around the £10 per month mark and as the price dropped the numbers grew.

But users have become disillusioned by mobile broadband with some changing from long term contracts to prepay packages and only using their dongles as a back up or where there is no other internet access available. One reason for people reverting back to fixed line broadband is the disappointing speed and the limited coverage available. It was also thought mobile broadband would be popular with business people, but that market hasn’t been as fruitful as expected as many business travelers find airports, hotels and conference centres provide Wi-Fi with much faster speeds than offered by mobile broadband. Many bars and cafe’s also now offer free Wi-Fi and so there’s really very little need to carry a dongle if you need internet access. The arrival of smartphones like the iPhone that can access the web have also reduced the need for dongles and have contributed to the drop in mobile broadband sales.

Charles Dunstone Chief Executive of Carphone Warehouse said, “We get a sense that the mobile broadband thing has peaked. We are seeing some of those people begin to realise that the bandwidth you get on mobile is so much less than you get on a fixed line.” He went on to add, “Mobile broadband is increasingly a supplementary rather than a substitutional thing, and an increasing proportion of Carphone sales are of pre-pay dongles. I carry one around with me and am also surprised now how much free Wi-Fi is available: on the train, a lot of hotels have it, bars etc. I’m using Wi-Fi more when I am out and about than mobile broadband.”

Many people like students are opting to use mobile broadband as a supplement to fixed line that is available in college and university. They are using pre pay services that only charge for time spent online as it is cheaper and more convenient than signing up for long contracts. Tesco Mobile said pay-as-you-go mobile broadband sales rose 71% last month as students started university, but sales of mobile broadband were declining.

What do you think? Do you use a dongle? Have you ditched yours in favour of using Wi-Fi?

Tell us your views we’d be interested to hear them.

Yes the title of this article might sound like a Double Entendre or a line you might hear from an old “Carry On” movie, but it’s advice you should heed if you use a dongle.

Over the last year or so there has been huge growth in the mobile broadband market (more tan 2 million people signing up between January 2008-February 2009) as more people look to be able to access the Internet on the move.

The use of Dongles-a small device that can be plugged into a laptop or computer and give internet access wherever there is a mobile signal-is one of the fastest growing areas of Mobile Broadband because of their ease of use and convenience. Dongles are ideal for users who a have a lengthy commute, or for business people who need access to files and information, or even students who can study wherever they like and break the monotony of being stuck indoors for hours on end.

While Dongles definitely have plus points there is a downside that users need to be aware of. Most contracts specify a limit on the amount of data that can be downloaded in one month for the typical charge of say £10 or £15 per month. Any usage that exceeds these limits can lead to charges that could cost the user up to £200.

According to price comparison website Moneysupermarket.com the charges for exceeding the limits on Dongles vary greatly from network to network.

02 have the highest charges, which could cost users £200 if you exceed your data allowance by 1GB. The next highest is 3 who charge £102 per extra GB downloaded, but who would disconnect once a £50 excess had been reached. Both 3 and 02 do send text alerts to customers to warn them that their limits have been reached leaving the responsibility with the customer to manage their levels.

Other operators do not impose such high penalties for exceeding data limits, Orange only charge £14.64, Vodafone £15.00 and Virgin £14.95 for every 1GB over the limit stated in the contract. T-Mobile do not charge for excess use, but would disconnect over a certain limit and would advise the customer on an alternative more suitable contract to meet their usage needs.

An 02 spokesman did confirm they charged 20p per MB for overuse (The equivalent of £200 per GB) but said they went to great lengths to make sure customers did not go beyond their monthly allowance.

“Software on the dongle tells them constantly how much of the allowance they have left, and we send a text message at 50pc, 90pc and 100pc of the limit. Very few customers go over the limit. The charges are a deterrent to exceeding the limit – and they are effective in this,” said the spokesman.

Dongles are a really good way to gain internet access if you are on the move and we’d thoroughly recommend you try them if you haven’t already, but remember to keep an eye on your data limits or it could prove very expensive.