One of the biggest differences between mobile broadband packages and their land line equivalents is the limit on the amount of data you can download with your contract. Land line packages have typically had download limits imposed, to try to reduce costs for all customers, however, increasingly download limits are only found on the 'value' level packages (e.g. PlusNet and Orange have a 10GB download limit on their cheapest packages).

Because data costs more to transmit across a mobile network, even those mobile broadband packages with higher download speeds will still include a download limit. Below is a general guide as to what you could expect to be able to download in a month based on different download allowances.

1GB

This type of allowance would allow you to send over 50,000 average text emails, or browse over 20,000 html web pages a month (and, assuming you look at each page for about a minute, that's over 30 hours of browsing).

This is enough for about 300 average MP3 or YouTube downloads, or about two 'average' (dependent on length and bit rate) films. This may sound a lot initially, but the figures shown are alternatives, not totals.

For example, combining these to use all your allowance, you could download one film, about twenty MP3 and short video clips, send about 500 plain text emails, and browse for about 15 hours.

3GB

With this, you could send over 100,000 plain emails, browse over 60,000 web pages, download around 300 MP3s or short videos, or around 7 films (again, highly dependent on length and quality).

5GB

Around 250,000 plain emails or 100,000 web pages, around 1,500 song or video clips, and at least ten films.

7GB

Around 350,000 plain emails or 145,000 web pages, around 2,200 song or video clips, and at least fifteen films.

10GB

Around 500,000 plain emails (although if you were intending on doing this many, you'd probably have to be using an automated programme, which may be prohibited under your user agreement) or 200,000 web pages, around 3,000 song or video clips, and at least twenty films.

15GB

For ordinary web browsing, you should regard this type of package as 'unlimited', as it would be virtually impossible to use all of your limit on browsing and emailing with a 15 GB package. However, you would be restricted to about 5000MP or short video (e.g. YouTube) clips, or around 35 feature length films.

Therefore, this type of package would be good for those who intend to use their mobile broadband for media, although you may have to bear in mind your download limit toward the end of the month if you were using it every day.

(Figures are based upon 20k per email, 50k per web page, 3Mb per MP3 track or short video clip, and 400Mb per film. A gigabyte (GB) is defined as 1024Mb and a megabyte (Mb) is defined as 1024k. Note that standard web pages are likely to become more data intensive as time goes on - you may have to adjust these approximations according to the layout of the sites you commonly visit.)