The problem with mobile broadband

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

I’m a big fan of mobile broadband. In theory. The idea of a connection wherever you go, the promise of lower costs than fixed broadband, the possibility of even higher speeds than fixed! The reality, which I’m living through right now, remains frustrating.

For the last few days, I’ve had to “rely” on mobile broadband as I wait for my broadband connection to go live in my new house. The trouble is, it doesn’t work at all well. The first problem is reception: I don’t live in central London but in deepest Bucks, and that means I can only get a GPRS connection. (more…)

A broadband cap I actually like

Monday, October 20th, 2008

When it comes to mobile broadband, it’s easy to get bogged down in specs such as download speeds and data caps. But sometimes it’s the things that are never mentioned on the spec sheets that make the difference.

Here, for example, are two mobile broadband dongles from O2 (left) and BT (click here to read about BT’s new mobile broadband service). One causes me endless hassle on the train journey into work of a morning, while the other is painless. The difference? That little white piece of string that keeps the BT dongle’s cap connected to its body. 

Something as innocuous as a cap retainer might sound utterly trivial, but I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve ended up on my hands and knees, picking my way through the half-eaten bag of Doritos and discarded newspapers under the train table, trying to find the AWOL O2 cap. It doesn’t even fit on the other end of the stick!

The BT cap, meanwhile, remains firmly anchored to the stick, no matter how many hard-disk threatening bumps the train encounters.  How much does that little piece of string add to the cost of the device? A tiny fraction of sod all. How much difference does it my mobile broadband “experience”? A pretty sizeable one.

Comedian solves BT’s broadband problems

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Dave Gorman is a very funny man. However, he’s lost his sense of humour over his faltering BT broadband connection, which disappeared down a black hole three days ago.

“I’m not a violent man but right now I would cheerfully hurt someone from BT,” Gorman writes on his blog. “In fact my sense of proportion has diminished to the point where I can’t work out if it would be in particularly bad taste to suggest that running Kris Marshall over again would be, well, satisfying. Probably.
Still, if he will advertise BT’s services…”

However, what piqued my interest was his superb suggestion of ISPs providing mobile broadband dongles to people whose landlines have given up the ghost: a courtesy connection in the same way garages provide a courtesy car when your runaround is being repaired.

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T-Mobile’s magic stick

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

This past fortnight, I have been mostly testing USB mobile broadband modems. Testing them until my eyes bleed.

Until yesterday, T-Mobile had provided us with the larger Huawei E220 USB modem you can see at the top of the photo here. And to be honest, it was pretty ropey. Tim Danton described last week the trouble he had installing the device and the download speeds we recorded – even when sat upon the 6th floor balcony here at Dennis Towers – were distinctly underwhelming. Speeds were typically hovering around 300-400Kb/sec, placing T-Mobile well behind rivals such as Vodafone and 3.

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