BT offers £11-a-month mobile access

BT is offering its broadband subscribers GPRS access on the move for an initial minimum £5 a month, rising to £11 after three months.

The price includes a Wifi-enabled phone but GPRS downloads are limited to just 10Mbytes a month and you have to sign up for at least 18 months. You get unlimited downloads and free VoIP at any BT Openzone hotspot, 50 texts and 50 voice-call minutes.

Families can get extra phones for £5 extra each a month but usage allowances have to be shared. The entry-level offer would cost a total £23.99, rising to £29.99, with fixed broadband charges.

For £5 extra a month you get 100 minutes of voice calls and 100 texts; £10 more gets your 250 minutes and 150 texts; and £30 more gets you 600 minutes and 700 texts.

You can link into up to four email accounts, and set how often they are checked for new messages, but BT does not yet offer push email.

You get a choice of two HTC-made phones: the S620, which has a slide-out mini-keyboard to facilitate texting; and the S710, which has a Blackberry style mini-keyboard and costs an initial £29.99 for subscribers in the lowest two payment bands.

The BT download allowance is meagre compared with, say, T-Mobile's Web'n'Walk deals which start at £15 for what is described as a 3GByte 'fair use' monthly allowance. However the BT deal, called Total Broadband Anywhere, would work out a lot better if you spend a lot of time around Openzone hotspots where you have unlimited access.

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