This is a question that Chris at Tamebay intends to answer, as indicated by his article ‘An affordable alternative to ASDL?‘

Although the answer will be arriving at a later date, he has prepped his readers with a introductory post on setting up his dongle and carrying out some speed tests. Although a little disappointed to be out of a turbo coverage area he still got speeds of around 565Kpbs, he noted, “In fairness I ran speed tests on my ADSL line and an NTL Cable connection which came out at 400Kpbs and 600Kbps - in comparison the 3 Mobile Broadband stacks up quite well.”

With this in mind he’s turned off the wifi card in his laptop and is going 3 mobile broadband full time, and I’m sure he’ll be relaying how it all pans out.