Traditional ISPs are having to fight harder than ever to retain their customers as more and more of us are switching to mobile broadband.

According to the recent YouGov Dongle Track Report the increasing popularity of mobile broadband could pose a serious threat to Internet Service Providers offering fixed-line connections. The survey found that one in eight mobile broadband subscribers have either abandoned their fixed line ISP or opted for a mobile internet service instead of a traditional ISP. A further 5% of those subscribing to both fixed-line and mobile broadband are planning on dropping their ISP service within the coming year. The mobile networks - Orange, Vodafone, O2, 3 and T-Mobile all offer a mobile broadband service.

According to YouGov “With increasing numbers of households dispensing with their landlines (13% according to Ofcom) accessing the Internet through the mobile phone network is a viable option especially for the young and mobile.”

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TalkTalk Broadband have just announced an extension to their offer of half-price broadband for three months until August. Customers who take out Talk Global Evening and Weekend will pay just £3.25 for the first three month, rising to £6.49 thereafter, maintaining the Carphone Warehouse run ISP’s status as one of the best value broadband providers on the market. Talk Global Anytime customers will pay just £5.25 for the first three months, rising to £10.49 thereafter. In addition to a monthly broadband charge, customers pay line rental to BT.

Both packages come with speeds of up to 8Mbps, a generous 40GB monthly allowance, free technical support and a free modem. For an extra £30 customers can purchase a wireless router. Talk Global evening and weekends customers are given free off-peak calls to 36 international destinations, including France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Brazil, China and Australia. Calls to mobile phones in Canada and the US are also included. On Talk Global Anytime customers can make international calls 24/7 free of charge. Phone calls to other worldwide destinations start at just 2p per minute.

Carphone Warehouse has invested £3million in training staff to sell laptops effectively. The broadband and mobile phone retailer is aiming to sell 1 million laptops a year.

The six-week intensive training programme concludes with an exam. Members of staff who pass the test have been promised an Acer laptop worth £350 as an incentive. Those who fail will not be allowed to sell laptops in a customer-facing role. The company found that while staff members who owned mobiles were able to draw on their own experiences when selling, most sales assistants could not afford a laptop so did not have the knowledge to back up their sales pitch.

“In training we give them real good basic knowledge about the things that make the laptops different form each other, why people might want a particular model, what needs it might solve, which ones have parental control, which don’t, and so on,” said Andrew Harrison, Chief Executive of Carphone UK.

The training programme comes as the retailer seeks to expand its customer base beyond its traditional mobile phone market, in order to protect itself against potential negative consequences of the current downturn in the economy. Mr Harrison said that more and more people require laptops to gain access to popular social networking sites.

“Prices of laptops are coming down, people want to do instant messaging and Facebook and most of them want to do it on a laptop,” he said. “We are about to go through same growth curve in laptops as we did in mobiles and if we are to enter this market we have to knowledgeable, credible staff and that means a huge investment in our people and training so they can give customers advice about which product is best for their needs.”

As part of its Wireless World proposition, launched last month, the company is stocking six laptops within each of its 809 UK stores. Brands stocked include from Acer, Fujitsu Siemens, Toshiba and EPC, and start from free to £249 if purchased with a mobile broadband contract from Carphone’s own brands TalkTalk and AOL, as well as Orange, T-Mobile and 3. Last year Carphone offered a free Dell laptop to new AOL subscribers.

O2 has come out top in a new study looking at broadband speeds in the UK. O2’s broadband service provides download speeds over 50% faster than its competitors in the UK. The website moneysupermarket.com found that its 8Mbps service gave an actual average speed of 5.39 Mbps. Runners up for the 8Mbps prize were Sky achieving an average of 3.59 Mbps, and TalkTalk an average 2.99 Mbps. O2 also leads the industry in terms of 16 Mbps and 20 Mbps packages, with an average speed of 8.15 Mbps. The average broadband speed in UK is 2.97Mbps.

Over 20,000 speed tests were carries out as part of the survey. The tests revealed that ISPs were reducing download speeds during peak times. However BT, O2 and Orange managed to keep up their speeds during peak hours while other providers struggled with capacity.

The top three providers all offer broadband as an add-on to existing packages – satellite for Sky, a landline service for TalkTalk, and O2’s mobile service. All three have sidestepped BT’s wholesaler service meaning fewer overheads and more control over speeds. The study showed that for best value, customers should opt for 2Mbps packages, where actual speed is 2.11Mbps for an average price of £10 a month. Packages offering least value for money are those with maximum download speeds of 16Mbps, where an average speed of just 7.02 Mbps typically costs £18.60 a month.

Well, it’s the first of July – pinch, punch, etc – and Tiscali were supposed to announce that they had found someone to take over their European broadband operations… Problem is, they’re still undecided on the sale of their business.

First of all, the offer made by the Carphone Warehouse was rejected outright by Tiscali, and then it looked as though Vodafone were going to step into the broadband market, which would have put them ahead of mobile rivals O2 and Orange by a considerable amount – then this deal was scuppered at the last minute, with no indication from either party as to why, or indeed what the future for Tiscali and it’s millions of UK subscribers was likely to be.

Tiscali had stated that they would have made an announcement by the end of June – it’s now July, and so far, nessuna risposta.

Consumer concerns over the controversial adware outfit Phorm were brought into sharp relief last week when it was revealed that Virgin Media staff members did an HMRC – some 3,000 customers bank details were burned, unencrypted, to a CD-R which was then promptly lost somewhere.

The details, including names and home addresses, were allegedly taken from those customers who had signed up for Virgin Media services in Carphone Warehouse high street outlets.

According to a report published in The Register, Virgin Media have coughed up for credit file protection, meaning that customers credit histories will remain unaffected by any fraudulent activity which may arise from the data loss – good to know in these times of credit crunches and sub-prime slip-ups.

This will be another thorn in the side of the Phorm camp, who have been fighting an uphill struggle to convince consumers that their personal details will not be compromised by their cookie-tracking customer-relevant ad service.

Virgin, along with BT Broadband and TalkTalk have all agreed to sign up with Phorm, on the proviso that customers will be given the choice to ‘opt out’ of the service. Findings of a survey carried out by Ofcom which were published last month, revealed that more than two-thirds (69 per cent) of UK citizens are concerned about identity fraud and the amount of personal data that is available to companies and businesses. With the top three ISPs in the UK facing increasingly stiff competition from the other three snapping at their heels, any decision likely to alienate and drive away existing consumer bases isn’t likely to roll very well.

Vodafone have reportedly done a volte face and pulled out of their bid to take over the residential broadband, home phone and digital TV services of triple-play provider Tiscali, according to the Financial Times.

Reportedly, the two companies failed to agree on a sum which would see Vodafone acquiring Tiscali’s broadband businesses not only in the UK, but across Europe as well. The map to the right shows the extent of Tiscali’s continental reach. Lime green indicates countries where Tiscali operates independently, and the purple countries are markets where the Tiscali brand is present, but the company does not wholly own the service provided, like the AOL/Carphone Warehouse situation here in the UK.

Speaking of Charles Dunston and the gang, Carphone also dropped out of the Tiscali bidding war back in May. This leaves Sky, Swisscom and fellow Italian comms provider Wind Telecomunicazioni.

EDIT: The map wouldn’t display for some reason in the original post. The bug has been fixed, and now you can witness it in all its cartographic glory.

Mobile broadband could become free to use as early as 2009, according to broadband comparison site Top 10 Broadband. In a bid to out-do competition, mobile providers have cut broadband charges dramatically over the last year, to the extent that further price-cuts could render the service free-of-charge anyhow.

According to Jessica McArdle of Top 10 Broadband, “With competition reaching its zenith, it is only a matter of time before mobile broadband modems – dongles – are offered free with mobile phone packages in the same way as ISPs such as TalkTalk offer ‘free’ home broadband with home phone deals”.

At the moment around one in ten people use mobile broadband to get online. However, with faster and more powerful handsets, as well as cheaper monthly price plans, broadband on-the-go is becoming a practical and viable alternative to a fixed connection. Huge price-drops in the mobile broadband market over the past year mean that consumers no longer consider it the luxury they used to. For example, at just £16 a month, Vodafone’s mobile broadband service is 65% cheaper and four times faster that its £45 deal of 2006. Top 10 Broadband lists 3, T-Mobile and Orange as other key providers offering mobile broadband packages which start at £10-£15.

Unsurprisingly, the drive for mobile broadband is coming from younger consumers. A recent study conducted by Sony Ericsson in over 30 countries concluded that 15-24 year olds increasingly expect the same service they experience on the internet to transfer to their mobiles.

“The youth are setting the scene,” said Vishnu Singh, regional manager for the Ericsson Consumer Lab in Southeast Asia. “[They] are now expecting mobile broadband services to be as rich as the Internet”.

Carphone Warehouse are poised to cash in on the rising popularity of mobile broadband services today with the launch of their new free laptop deals. In addition to the same AOLFree Laptop deal currently doing the rounds on this very site, as of today, punters visiting selected Carphone Warehouse stores will be able to sign on the dotted line to qualify for one of six models of free laptops, provided that they also opt in to a broadband package.

Carphone will be setting up separate sections in its high-street stores for The Broadband Shop, an area dedicated to selling mobile broadband services from T-Mobile, Orange, 3, and fixed line from Virgin Media, TalkTalk and AOL Broadband, much like the Virgin Mobile sections set up in certain Zavvi (née Virgin Megastore) outlets. The deal with Virgin will see Carphone being able to flog all four of the Virgin Media services in their own stores; that’s broadband, digital TV, fixed-line and mobile phone services.

Neil Berkett, action chief executive ay Virgin Media said: “By extending our product portfolio in-store and making it simple and easy for customers to sign up, we’re hoping Virgin Media will be at the top of shopping lists.” This mutually beneficial arrangement gives the second and third ranked broadband providers the opportunity to close the gap on market leaders BT.

Carphone head honcho Charles Dunstone believes that the free laptop offer will pay off, especially with younger surfers who want the freedom of mobile broadband: “Our research has shown that for people over 14, having a laptop is becoming more important than having a mobile phone,” says Mr Dunstone. “And they don’t want to wrestle with their siblings and their parents to look at websites like Facebook or YouTube.”

Carphone Warehouse’s new business and multi-channel director Andy Brem said that launch “this is only the start. We are doing with laptops and broadband what we did with mobile phones”.

Carphone Warehouse is to sell 50 percent of its retail business to giant US retail chain Best Buy for a cool £1.1bn, and plans to funnel the cash into an overhaul of its broadband infrastructure.

Carphone, who operate TalkTalk and own AOL’s UK broadband services, will keep the remaining 50 percent of their stake in their domestic retail business, which will eventually lead to Best Buy-branded stores opening up across in Europe; despite this, Carphone will hold on to all of its telecoms concerns.

It is thought that the majority of the investment will go toward getting ADSL2+ connectivity rolled out across both providers, as well as expanding availability through the LLU/BT Openreach program in order to keep up with providers such as Be Broadband, Sky and Virgin Media all of whom either offer ADSL2+ solutions or next-gen speeds.

Data from samknows.com reveals that TalkTalk have installed equipment in 1,632 exchanges to date, with another 31 currently awaiting installation. By comparison, AOL has equipment in 1,049 exchanges, with no more exchanges slated as of yet. This could all change in the coming months however; keep checking back here to see what services you can sign up for at your exchange.