Why you won’t get the mobile broadband speeds Ofcom claims

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

On first inspection, Ofcom paints a rosy picture of the state of mobile broadband in Britain. O2 (somewhat surprisingly, given our past real-world tests) tops the charts with average speeds close to 3Mbits/sec, with only Orange customers looking like they should find a new network.

However, examine Ofcom’s testing methodology more closely, and it becomes clear that those chart-topping 3Mbits/sec speeds are likely to be far higher than the average customer will receive.

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Nothing fair about “fair-use” policies

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

This is the problem when I’m out of the office for the PC Pro podcast: there’s nobody to get irrationally angry when my colleagues say something moronic.

Step forward David Bayon and Darien Graham-Smith, who claimed that T-Mobile’s decision (now partially reversed) to cut “fair use” data caps to 500MB was essentially “fair” – it was just the way T-Mobile presented it that was the problem.

Sorry chaps, but you’re wrong. Hideously, grossly, sleep-with-your-wife’s-mother-behind-her-back wrong.

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How to switch off Virgin Media’s mobile broadband image compression

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Recently, I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time in the company of 3G dongles for our “Mobile Broadband Con” feature, which will be hitting the shelves on 11 February.

One of the aforementioned cons of mobile broadband is image compression – a process where the networks water down the images on websites to conserve bandwidth. The end result is that sites such as the BBC homepage look as if they’ve been dipped in the bath, and in my experience, the compression barely saves any time at all on page downloads.

Many networks allow you to switch the compression off if you wish. Virgin Media doesn’t, on the rather dubious premise that it’s helping customers stay within their data download limits.

However, there is a sneaky way to beat the Virgin image washout, which I accidentally stumbled across during my tests. Virgin piggybacks on the T-Mobile network, and if you download T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Accelerator software, you’ll find that it can be used to adjust the compression on Virgin, too.

Why Britain’s watchdogs have fewer teeth than goldfish

Friday, November 20th, 2009

If there’s one thing that makes me angry, it’s other people not getting angry enough. Britain has swathes of so-called regulators and “watchdogs” monitoring everything from advertising, to telecoms, to the protection of our private data, and they’re all about as much use as a toaster in a bath.

Take the Information Commissioner, for example. Christopher Graham may have started talking tough about cracking down on data leaks when he waltzed into his six-figure salary job this summer, but his feeble actions speak far louder than his fighting talk.

It was the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who revealed that staff at a UK mobile network had illegally sold thousands of customer account details to brokers. That data was used to cold-call customers nearing the end of their contracts, in a bid to convince them to move to a rival network.

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First look: the Android G1

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

After months of hype, we’ve finally laid hands and eyes on the most hotly-anticipated mobile phone launch since the first iPhone came out.

As you’ll probably know by now, unless you’ve been living in a particularly dark and damp cave over the past few months and weeks, the T-Mobile G1 is the first handset to sport Google’s Android mobile operating system. And, after a brief tete-a-tete with the phone this morning, we’re ready to report our first impressions. So how does it stack up?

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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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