Thingummie Minor has been looking into Mobile Broadband, for when we're traveling in the UK soon.
Apparently this service comes from buying a dongle, and paying for some airtime. She says 02, Mobile-3, and Vodafone are the company contenders.
Anyone have any opinion on the relative merits of said companies? Okay to go with whichever is cheapest?
My daughter Helen uses this - she lives in a room underground somewhere in Swiss Cottage with no phone-line.
She's had it about 6 months and had no problems with it - she's very non-techie but she found it completely simple to set up (plugged in dongle which came in the post) and use with her laptop.
I think she uses Vodafone and her contract is £10 a month with a 3GB monthly download allowance, I'll check with her when she comes home tomorrow.
But you won't want a contract (to get the dongle 'free' she took one for a year) - and I think they now do Pay As You Go where you pre-purchase airtime and use it as you wish.
I'm sure that all three of those companies are equally reliable and neck-and-neck in the market so probably offering near-identical packages, so it should be a matter of checking which offers you most nearly what you want and going for it!
Please do go ahead - this means you can check regularly into HF on your travels and keep in touch 
Excellent, thanks for the helpful reply.
I've forwarded your response to Thingummie Minor.
I'll let you know what she decides.
Hmm. Already encountered a problem. Apparently they want to mail the dongle to the customer's address. This way they can keep track of folks in case any criminal activity online ensues. Or something? And the address has to be in the UK.
Oh dear! that's just daft, how do they expect tourists to manage then?
Can you get someone over here to receive it for you and post it on - or would they know and that might contravene some legal thingy? I'd be happy to myself, if it doesn't lead to complications for you using it.
I guess we'll walk in to the shop in London and buy the dongle on the spot. At least I hope we will. Then we can say our address is.... and use our London Hotel address. Stay tuned for more on this story... eventually, heh.
[and thanks for your kind offer of borrowing your address... 
]
Gosh! I don't know what terrorists are going to do for communication with all those rules. I guess they'll have to manage without.
Unless of course they want to lie about their address, which would be breaking the law 
I bet they can get them from Robbed-Dongles-R-Us or somewhere similar.