I’ve got a Vodaphone one, and there are places right in the middle of Sheffield where I can’t get a signal at all. I regularly make the journey from York to Sheffield on the train, sometimes via Leeds and sometimes via Doncaster, and I have given up bothering trying to connect to the internet – the signals come and go too fast. This is a very urban area (particularly going via Leeds), and I imagine in rural areas it will be even worse.

Mobile broadband is great when it works, but, in my experience at least, it doesn’t live up to the promises made about it.

I seem to remember a certain RWC column recommended a) using unlocked cards or dongles (which normally have MUCH better drivers than the networks provide) and b) carrying several SIMs, so that if you’re in an area where one network can’t provide data (or only gives you GPRS), chances are one of the other four will oblige.

It’s quite a good column – well worth a read at some point

P.

Coverage is not good enough. No wonder the operators can afford to give away IP traffic – 3 is pushing the marginal cost for anyone who uses prepaid voice toward zero.

There’s another problem – that in the ten years since GPRS came along, no-one has come up with an IP stack adapted to mobile comms. When (not if) your device loses its carrier, the stack panics, the OS panics, and the app panics. Then it starts the handshake all over again.

It’s pathetic.

i think it’s more to do with the dongle than the 3G network itself. I have a Sony TT laptop
with internal 3G, I tend to get 1 to 2 m/s most of the time. I have tried to use the dongle on the same laptop and network, I cannot get over 0.5 m/s. In some areas, I cannot get good
signal on the dongle, but I can still get 0.5m/s when using the internal 3G.
I think it’s more to do with the hardware.

I tend to agree with the comments that the hardware is part of the problem. This is certainly the case, for example, with wifi routers in the home where choosing the right router can make a significant difference to the overall performance of the network. Its a pity that telco companies don’t get out into the real world a bit more often and make more efforts to ensure that they are delivering a good service rather than simply boasting about speed and coverage.

You raise the question but, not much else. Hopefully, that’s all that is needed to get the industry moving in the right direction.

I use a ‘3′ E169G for all my broadband – at home and travelling and find it quite adequate for my purposes. The times I’ve bothered to use it on the Brighton to London train it generally works if slowly. But, it’s the tunnels that spoil the expereince. What can you do?

I’ve not tried it with the BBC iPlayer using it instead for radio. Then, I day dream about why I cant pick up the digital TV Freeview signals!

I am quite frankly amazed by this article & some of the comments. I use T-Mobile at work; it runs at about two thirds the speed of my home broadband and is very reliable. When I was investigating getting mobile broadband, it soon became obvious to me that the services being offered tended to be localised and limited. Did no one get asked to input their postcode to check on the reception?

Given this fact, why does anyone expect this system to work on a train, moving quickly in and out of areas that are randomly changing from receiving signals that are good, indifferent, bad and, in open countryside, even non-existent. What do you think happens when you go through a tunnel or past a hill blocking the transmitter? Well, durh.

Most serious problem with my T-Mobile connection is the apparent downgrade of my service to ‘disconnect on idle’. I took out my contract two months ago and the coverage, connection, and speed were excellent. The day after my second direct debit was paid the drop-outs started. If I want to get anything done I have to have the i-player on in the background to keep the connection on. I obviously can’t keep this up or I’ll exceed the fair use policy.
Now I have been chatting to people who work for a 3G company and they confirm off the record that new contracts are put on a higher level of service for a while and then downgraded, just as I have been.
Any views?

And as an aside: the Central London columnist sticks his hand up and says – Oh, you think reception is better here? hahahaha-bonk, as I believe les Nerds are prone to say. O2 advised me a number of weeks ago to disable 3G on my iPhone, because they have broken that bit of their network and the old Edge system is way more reliable. All I have managed to do with mobile data is tether my Blackberry, which appears to perform OK when there is a signal to actually work with; however, there is an “opportunity” embedded in all this stuff which curiously, I’ve not seen anyone take up: where is the broadband dongle speedometer?

I ask because practically the first example of broadband data access I saw was in Germany, where they made a huge fuss about “UMTS”, before marching in to give a client presentation on their laptop. It was toe-curlingly embarrassing, even after one gets round the national tendency to be prolix when sitting in front of Powerpoint: slides would take ages to actually grovel up (but no problem for the presenter! he had LOADS to say while we were waiting, oh dear me yes!)

Once it had lost connection twice, I jumped into a phonebox and leapt back out as NetworkMan… ok, maybe not… anyway, I had a look at the machine. A quick test download from a known fast site showed that despite being in 3G mode, the stick was struggling along at… 5k a second.

So I found them a wire and plugged that in.