Lenovo brings no-contract mobile broadband to the ThinkPad

Lenovo wants to cut out the mobile broadband middleman in the best way it can: By launching its own broadband service.

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The service, called Lenovo Mobile Access (LMA), will offer owners of certain ThinkPad Classic and ThinkPad Edge models the ability to connect to the Internet directly from their devices.

The contract-free service will run for $2 for thirty minutes, and $9 for an entire day. Lenovo is also offering monthly plans, which run for $45 for 2GB of data and $80 for 6GB.

Available July 1st, the service will be initially available in the U.S, UK, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands.

The move is a major boon for Lenovo’s enterprise-heavy user base, which will no doubt appreciate the flexibility and lack of a binding contract. Meant for more short-term use, Lenovo aims for Lenovo Mobile Access to supplement existing broadband plans, not replace them. In all, the service will be a significant value-added feature for Lenovo’s devices.

LMA is powered by Macheen Inc., an Austin, Texas-based company that’s built the service to scale.

Lenovo, for its part, isn’t new to mobile broadband, having offered similar deals in devices like the IdeaPad S205s for some time now. But Lenovo Mobile Access is a new sort of beast — with it Lenovo is moving away from the contract-based models of mobile providers towards something smaller and more flexible.

Everyone seems to be getting into the mobile broadband space nowadays. Last month, Bright House, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner announced CableWiFi, a shared WiFi network offered to all of the company’s customers.