I've been happy with ADSL until buying a Surface Pro tablet. Tablet is great for working out of office / out of country but using it in NZ is annoyingly expensive. It looks like all mobile broadband plans are designed to be used as backup/temporarily and not as your primary internet connection.  Speeds are fine but data transfer limits are really small.

As an example; Telecom offers 3GB mobile broadband plan for $49.
I'm currently visiting Finland and you can get an unlimited, full speed 3G plan for 14 EUR which is about $23.

This was first time that I found my tablet to really be a mobile device when I jumped into a car, plugged 3G dongle in and turned Xbox music on. In about 100km trip around countryside the playback cut off only twice and even then due speed drop, not because of loss of signal completely.

How come mobile broadband prices are so high in NZ? Is it due infrastructure costs or just by lack of competition in the market?