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How to use mobile broadband in businesss
Vodafone Mobile Broadband
Vodafone has embraced the concept of mobile broadband with a vengeance, offering the largest number of permutations around. There’s a choice of four modems, from the standard USB Modem Stick to an ExpressCard to the all-new Modem Stick Pro – this features a retractable USB connector for extra neatness, and works in both Europe and America (the standard version only works in Europe).
What impressed us most during testing, however was Vodafone’s reliability. Though it never quite hit the heights of its claimed 7.2Mbits/sec download speeds, we found its real-world speeds of between 1 and 2Mbits/sec to be perfectly adequate even for streaming video with the BBC iPlayer.
Upload speeds are also good, peaking at 400Kbits/sec in one central London location. That’s great news for mobile professionals who need to send large documents back to base – you should be able to send a 7MB file in under a minute.
Don’t expect this everywhere though: to hit those heights, you need to be in an area that supports High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), and right now that’s limited.
Vodafone offers businesses two monthly rates: £12.77 exc VAT per month for a 3GB data allowance, £21.28 exc VAT per month for a 5GB allowance. If you exceed your allowance, you’ll be charged £13.04 exc VAT per gigabyte (so 100MB would cost £1.30).
The standard USB Modem Stick is free, even if you sign up for just 12 months, but to get the USB Modem Stick Pro for free you’ll have to sign a 24-month contract.
If you do choose the standard stick, note that it’s supplied with Vodafone’s Mobile Connect Lite 3.2 software. We recommend you download Mobile Connect 9.3.0, which allows you to compress images and includes VPN client software.
