Mobile phone companies have long offered free handsets to customers in order to sign up for contracts but now they are offering free laptops!
Carphone Warehouse started giving away laptops with its home broadband package last September. Now mobile operators are following suit.
Last month Orange became the first operator to offer laptops in its shops and about a week ago, Phones4U said that it would sell laptops and in time may offer them free with mobile broadband contracts.
All are chasing the increasing demand for data to be transmitted to mobile devices as income from voice services in a saturated and increasingly competitive market declines. Last month, Vodafone revealed that service revenues for its first quarter were up 2.1 per cent in the UK thanks to data and messaging, but revenues from phone calls fell by almost 4.4 per cent.
The 3G spectrum for which operators forked out a combined £22 billion in 2000 enables data to be sent at high speeds.
Other drives for the wireless market are:
• More than half a million dongles were sold between February and the end of June this year, according to Ofcom, the communications watchdog
• Gartner estimates that global sales of wireless modems will increase from 15.8 million this year to 51.1 million by 2012
• 47 per cent of people aged 16 to 24 use mobile broadband rather than a fixed broadband line, compared with 26 per cent of those aged 35 to 44
• 133,000 people signed up for mobile broadband connections in June this year, compared with 69,000 in February