Manx Telecom customers can now benefit from faster mobile broadband speeds on their mobile phones and laptops.
The company has spent ?1million on its mobile broadband network, including improvements in coverage across the Island.
Pay As You Go mobile customers will also be able to access the internet via 3G for the first time, previously this has only been available to pay monthly customers.
Mike Readshaw, Manx Telecom’s Next Generation Network (NGN) programme manager, said that the mobile broadband network improvements would allow users to access the internet much more quickly.
"Thanks to these technical improvements customers will have a better experience using our mobile broadband network," he said.
"One of the many advantages of the upgrade is that customers will notice significantly faster speeds when uploading photos and videos for example.
"A lot more people are now using iPhones and other smart phones to access social websites and moving away from just using PCs."
Mr Readshaw said that most 3G mobile broadband users would benefit from the faster speeds, but some owners of older phones and internet ‘dongles’ may find that they need to upgrade their handsets or laptop equipment to take advantage of the network improvements.
The company has carried out technical improvements to the High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network which will double the speed at which data can be downloaded.
"The improved HSPA network has download speeds of up to 7.2Mbps (Megabits per second) and upload speeds of up to 1.4Mbps compared to 3.6Mbps and 384Kbps with the previous network," added Mr Readshaw.
"Customers should therefore experience a two-fold increase in their download speed and a three-fold increase in their upload speed providing they have the appropriate devices.
"In addition to faster speeds, to improve our 3G network coverage, we have also installed thirteen new radio base stations across the Island as part of this improvement project."
Manx Telecom is also looking at even higher download speeds and will be trialling speeds of up to 14.4Mbps in May and June 2010.
