WiFi vs 3G: On the road at 70mph

Practically all laptops these days have wireless LAN (aka WiFi) built-in as standard.  It makes sense as an ever increasingly amount of households have WiFi at home and hotspots are popping as quickly as new Starbucks (which is, incidentally, where you'll see a lot of laptops using WiFi...)

WiFi is good when you're stationary but isn't so great when you're not.  When out and about it can be a pain trying to find a hotspot you can use and then of course, there's often the rigmarole of connecting to  a hotspot if you're fortunate enough to find one.  That's where 3G comes to the rescue...

On the M1 motorway yesterday I was able to stay connected to the internet at 384kbps (in reality, actually a bit more like 350kbps) for over an hour without losing connection.  I was able to use my laptop as if I were at home or in a hotspot.  You just can't do this with WiFi.

I was using an Nokia N73 tethered to an Eee PC and using 3's 3G network.  Faster speeds are probably possible with an HSDPA handset/modem - although I'm not sure of the coverage on that part of that motorway.  With data plans getting cheaper and coverage increasing all the time, 3G/3.5G seems to make more sense than WiFi when out of the house.