Mark Bridge writes:

Being an optimistic cynic isn’t easy. But, hey, I do my best.

Which is why I smiled benignly when I heard this week that WiFi provider The Cloud was offering a free app to O2 iPhone users. It's a simple tool called FastConnect and it'll make it easy for those O2 customers to find free WiFi access via hotspots powered by (you guessed it!) The Cloud.

The first-ever Orange Business Index, which looks at the previous year's trends in business mobile communications, shows that average data use across all Orange UK business customers increased by over 150% during 2009. The highest increase was among small business, which saw a 290% increase in data consumption to a monthly average of 16.3MB per user. Medium-sized businesses experienced a 226% increase; a monthly average of 10.9MB per user. Much of this increase in mobile data usage has been driven by the rise in popularity of mobile email and web browsing.

In our podcast on 31st March, we talked about Vodafone's partnership with British Gas. 'Smart meters' with a mobile GPRS data connection are expected to help nearly a million UK households manage their gas supplies by the end of 2012.

However, although these meters won't need fast mobile data, ABI Research anticipates a dramatic growth in machine-to-machine connections using 4G services. Its latest report says the number of 4G M2M modules shipped worldwide will jump from around 40,000 this year to 12.6 million in 2015.

Mark Bridge writes:

In recent years we’ve seen many a newspaper headline about the high charges for mobile data when abroad. Horror stories that warned of bills exceeding £1000 per week.