Virgin Mobile will today become the last of the six largest UK mobile phone operators to join the rush to connect consumers to the internet with the launch of its own mobile broadband package.
The launch of the £15-a-month service follows yesterday's news that more than a dozen mobile and IT companies had got together to push mobile broadband by creating laptop devices that would be able to connect to it "out of the box".
Companies including Dell, Toshiba, Microsoft, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Ericsson combined with the mobile industry trade group GSM Association to create a mobile broadband service mark that can be put on any hardware able to access the mobile web immediately after purchase.
The first notebook computers with mobile broadband inside will be ready to switch on and surf straight out of the box in 91 countries across the world in time for the festive season, backed by a $1bn (£562m) global advertising budget.
The move is a direct attack on the rise of Wimax, a competing technology that has limited use in Europe but is being rolled out in a number of major US cities.
It is a potential competitor to the next generation of mobile phone technology, called LTE.
Wimax has also been backed by Google, which put $500m into a Wimax venture created by the US mobile phone company Sprint and a rival communications company, Clearwire, earlier this year.
The search engine has already made another - albeit less powerful - wireless broadband service called wifi, free in its home town of Mountain View, California.
More than 55 million people currently use mobile broadband services in 91 countries. (full story Link)
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