“Mobile Internet usage will displace fixed-line Internet usage,” said chief executive Rene Obermann. “It will change the way we live and work even more than mobile voice.”

The Web’n’Walk service is actually closer to dial-up than broadband, with a basic monthly fee of £30 (US$52) for 100 minutes of voice and 40MB of data, and speeds up to 384Kbit/s where 3G is available, but usually much less.

The price breaks down to about £10 a month for the data, according to U.K. managing director Brian McBride, who claimed this was more than most users would require: “That’s about 2,500 emails or 500 web pages.”

T-Mobile did not offer any extra incentives, like the free six months’ introduction O2 offered with its i-mode service, which launched last month. T-Mobile Executives were unwilling to compare their services, but implied that O2’s i-mode is a traditional “walled garden” approach, where users will be persuaded to remain on tailored i-mode sites, while Web’n’Walk will give them “the whole Internet in their pocket”. “Walled gardens will not bloom,” said McBride.

Despite this, T-Mobile’s own walled garden, T-zones, will continue to exist, and will be linked from the Web’n’Walk home page, said Obermann.

Despite what it claims is a low price, T-Mobile has stopped short of unmetered access, because mobile Internet is still an untried market, said McBride: “There will always be some premium for mobility. This is early days and we’re going to monitor how it works.” He added: “We are not here to rip people off - we’re here to create a new mass market.” The company also said it won’t be pushing VOIP because it’s not ready for the mass market.