Mobile broadband allows you to connect to the internet when you’re on the go and out of your office or home. To get mobile broadband on your computer or laptop you usually need a USB ‘dongle’. A dongle has a SIM card inside it just like a mobile phone and allows you to connect to the internet through a 3G network connection. Many mobile broadband deals come with a free dongle included.

In the simplest terms, a data allowance is a limit on how much information you’re allowed to receive through your connection in a given time. Another way to express this is that a data allowance is a limit on how much you can ‘use the internet’ through your connection.

Data is generally measured in kilobytes (kB), megabytes (MB) and gigabytes (GB). A megabyte is 1,000 kilobytes, and a gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes, or 1,000,000 kilobytes. Data allowances vary greatly in range from a few hundred megabytes to tens of gigabytes. To put this into some context, refer to the table below which shows the data ‘cost’ of some common internet activities.

 As can be seen from the table, multimedia activities like streaming music and video use the most data, so if you’re planning on using these services extensively you should select a plan with a higher data allowance.