After having some bad experiences with my previous mobile provider -the biggest one on the Belgian market, you all know who- I decided to move over my mobile services to the same provider as my telephone and Internet : telenet; they have the advantage that one does not need to pay any extra membership fees for mobile services ; the cost was on a pay-per-use basis.

While the telenet mobile service was actually pretty good value-for-money (as far as I recall they are a reseller for mobistar), they had one big disadvantage : this was only a speech and texting service, and no mobile surfing at all.

Since I recently bought an LG Viewty (KU990) mobile, and am an avid user and fan of it, I decided to look for a new provider that offered some kind of data service at an acceptable price, so I could use the phone at it's full potential (web surfing and email).

For a while, it looked like this would be like finding a needle in a haystack; most of the services were either cheap but to limited (i.e. 10MB/month for 5/10 €) or to expensive for my occasional usage (25/50€/month).

Luckily, while I was looking around, Base launched the perfect solution : Base Data Comfort.

With this service, they offer 200MB download and upload/month at EDGE speeds, at a single cost of 10€/month.

This is actually a first in Belgium, and is so new that even in the Base shop I registered, they never heard about it. Base does not seem to make a lot of noise about this, but I personally think this might be one of the key selling points to become a Base member; for me this was the key factor.

At this moment I am really happy with this solution, but of course it is a little bit too early to build a final verdict.

There are only two disadvantages right now :
- Base does not offer UMTS or HSDPA. However, browsing seems to work at an acceptable speed, and :
      a) the chance that HSDPA is available within my region is probably non-existent.
      b) the difference between UMTS and EDGE is minimal as far as i can tell.
- The other disadvantage at this moment was that I needed to sign a contract for at least 24 months. But, even if I might decide to break up my contract, the fee I will need to pay will be less than the one I needed to pay to Proximus when I cancelled my contract.