Just had a Vodafone one on loan from while in the UK this week (looks like a remarked merlin one)... Pretty good on their network, semed like a 40K or so connection with a little bit more latency.

Very useable with VPN... didn't surf the web (e.g. I've been off FT for a week just due to lack of time), but was acceptable.

Was much more responsive than Infrared or Bluetooth from the phone to the PC for data.

Although I did notice some areas in the country (UK) where coverage was good but latency was horrible. Might have just been network saturation or data issues?