17 posts tagged “mobile broadband”

Technology is great but, like women*, it comes with a lot of hassles and sometimes you wonder if it's really worth the effort.  That's where I am right now with this mobile broadband malarky.  Is it 3?  Is it Huawei's E220 modem?  Is it the local cell tower?  Is it this Vista laptop?  I have no idea, much like women, it's a complete mystery to me... way too many variables and hard to pinpoint where to place blame.

So, that's why I've not really posted anything.  Each web page takes forever to load, this is really a trip down memory lane to 1998, although in 1998 there weren't many webpages that clocked in at over a meg!

So much for my 5 gig a month - I doubt I could use up that allowance in a few months at this rate!

*or, if you're a woman or gay, substitute women for men (as appropriate)

So, I'm staying with my sister for a few days and she's just moved into this lovely new place.  All's well and good except she doesn't have ADSL enabled yet (any day soon!) oh, and no Sky - but I can manage with Freeview for a week.

Anyway back to the broadband... I really do miss my crappy 2 meg at home.  Sure it's slow compared to 98% of the rest of the country, but it sure beats whatever the hell I'm getting from what is supposedly an HSDPA connection right now this minute.

To be fair though, I have a sneaky feeling there's some kind of conflict between my dongle and this Vista laptop as the same sim works fine accessing the same shoutcast streams when in a phone (her DAB reception is, as we say in England, pants).

Oh well, we'll probably be switched on tomorrow.

Spending a few days at my sister's new place, staying in for deliveries etc. All well and good though because as long as I have a laptop and broadband, I'm good to go.  One small hitch though, she doesn't yet have ADSL.  No probs, though, I've got mobile broadband...

...but it's really really slow today!  Like dial-up speeds - it's painfully slow.  Kinda wondering if this Vista laptop is doing some software updates in the background.  That's all I need!

The last few days have been a pain.  I've been fighting against technology and losing!  Why can't things just work, and why can't they be easier?

Sky+
Getting a Sky+ box replaced?  Did you know you can't transfer existing recordings to your new box?  And if you're going to keep using the old one as a 'free' box in another room you won't have access to your recordings anymore?

I'm not getting a Sky+ replaced, but my parents are.  Guess who's spent much of yesterday trying to clear the Sky Planner?  Moi!  They don't have a DVD recorder so I had to come up with a genius plan of using their DV camcorder and a laptop.  Don't worry, I wasn't videoing the TV screen - their Canon camera does an analogue to digital conversion.

Mobile broadband
My sister was back from the Far East and wanted to get online at HQ (Mum and Dad's).  Should've been simple enough, it nearly always works without a hitch (unless I'm on the train or Nando's!)  Guess what?  It didn't work!  Tried my laptop, their laptop, my niece's laptop.  Nothing.  Put the SIM in my spare mobile.  Nothing.  Who gets the blame for this, depite it being outside of my control?  Me, that's who!

Sky Broadband / WiFi
The folks have just got themselves ADSL from Sky.  It wasn't working Saturday as far as I know but I figured it was worth a try on Sunday (especially as it was the Sunday that the 3 Mobile Broadband went pear shaped).  Surprisingly it was enabled and working.  Took little effort to connect to...

...oh I was naive to think that was that!  The connection was all over the place and even today there's issues with the WiFi.  One laptop works well (although it refused to even connect for an hour last night) and another won't work unless it's within 10ft of the router.  On top of that, their videosender is now plagued with interference.  Bugger.  That's another problem to figure out (oh, and I guess that might have some bearing on WiFi connection issues, d'oh!)

Sky Player / Sky Anytime on PC
This proved tricky as the software is kinda buggy (at least on this Vista laptop).  It's great when it works without issue though.  Picture quality is good and it's a genuinely useful application if you have the film channels.  Shame that there's been reboots and ctrl-alt-dels aplenty to keep it going!  Oh and the download meter bears no similarity to reality.

Misc.
Then there's websites not working properly or at all (issues not related to poor connectivity).  Slow downs in the calender option menu on the E71 - I just wanted to correct a time and I had to wait 30 seconds between button presses!  Push email isn't pushing.  Jaiku on mobile isn't connecting.  My sister wanted her pictures off her camera so we needed to figure out how to do so...

Kinda hilarious as it would turn out.  Her MS Pro Duo memory card was almost the same size as my SD card.  The Toshiba laptop takes both.  I figured I could probably just put it straight in without an adapter.  I figured wrong.  We then spent the next few minutes trying to get the card out!  My sister had work related photos amongst about a thousand on the card - she was panicky to say the least!

We got it out in the end - hopefully unharmed!  That's when we figured it would be a good idea to get an adapter for the card.  You saw how much of a success that was in a previous post.

Now I'm going to unplug myself.  I've had enough for the time being!  Might read a book or something.

...even 'minor' is a bit strong and it wasn't really broadcasting per se.

Getting on the train last night at Waterloo I received an email from 7th Syndikate's Agent Curtis.  It informed all of us lower-clearance agents that our cover had been blown due to us being splashed all over the London Evening Standard*.  Methinks there was a spy in our midst of, um, spies.

Damn shame that I didn't bag myself a copy of the paper.  I figured I could pick it up when I got home but nowhere seems to sell it any more.  Google Maps Mobile did prove useful though as I was able to get into it within seconds and get the numbers of all the local supermarkets (which saved me going around to them all to find out they didn't have any!)  Fortunately a friend who was leaving London a little later than me grabbed one.  Phew!

As for broadcasting live, well I Skype videocalled my niece from the train on my Eee PC.  It actually had some battery power after 30 mins use earlier in the day.  Whoa.  My mobile broadband kept cutting out though.  C'mon 3, sort your coverage out along the London commuter lines - if you were the only network that gave rock solid signal on these routes you'd have a helluva lot of folk switching to you.  Your signal is also patchy near my local 3Store and non-existant in Nando's (which is a short walk away from said 3Store).

Oh and the looks on the other commuters faces as I'm doing a videocall whilst talking about my previous night's espionage was totally Mastercard!

*until later today it will be the site's Picture of the Day

Mobile modems, 3G modems, mobile broadband dongles, whatever.  They're usually locked right?  Kinda makes 'em useless when travelling to a country that doesn't have a sister network, yeah?  So very true.  I've been reading over on The Inq, that there's ways of unlocking an Huawei E220.  That's cool, I have one of those and I travel to countries that aren't part of 3's 3-Like-Home service.

What The Inq suggests seems foolproof but I have a habit of turning supposedly easy things in to huge mammoth tasks.  SIMable might be a safer option for me but will it work?

Watch your dongles people!

It dawned on me last night that my mobile broadband modem (aka dongle, usb modem, mobile modem, HSDPA modem, HSDPA dongle, 3G dongle etc, phew! receives text messages.  It can also send text messages.

Actually, it didn't dawn on me last night.  No.  Rather the horrible thought that it's just as easy for scammers to send me messages to that (as it's just a normal SIM with a regular mobile number) as it is to my mobile phone.  Shudder...

When using the software provided with the dongle, if I so wish, I can send and receive messages.  I could also possibly receive spam from mBlox's partners and other companies of that ilk.  As I mostly use my mobile modem on my Linux-flavoured Eee PC and, as I have no way of seeing if I've received SMS messages on that OS, then I could be in the process of being fleeced right now and have absolutely no idea until either my bill arrives or I find my bank account overdrawn.

Looks like I need to log in to My3 on my PC.

In the meantime I recommend everyone in the UK that's on mobile broadband - check your account regularly!  The 419ers would love to get away with something like this (maybe they could club together and get enough money to go "legit" - in the UK you can scam people legally and don't have to pretend to be a dodgy solicitor, banker or civil servant!)

The above title sounds a little like the headers on those spam emails purporting to be from CNN or MSNBC.  But this time, this one's for real.

Dongles: where do you use yours?

Slightly misleading title as my trial 3 Mobile Broadband dongle hasn't gone back just yet.  However, it will in the next day or two.  Although I never got the thing working with my Eee PC (I used it with a Vista laptop instead) and, even though things weren't always 100% hunky dory, I still decided I needed to look into getting one for myself.

So, tomorrow I should be having delivered a Huawei E220.  I'll be getting up to 5 gig a month for £6.91 and the dongle thrown in.  Looking around, I think that's got to be the best mobile broadband deal in the UK at the moment.  And using 5 gig on mobile broadband can actually be more difficult than you'd imagine (I know from experience!*)

Anyone interested in the deal should check HotUKDeals out.  It's the site where I found this - oh, and by the way, you'll need Quidco.  If you've got a Linux flavoured Eee PC (or perhaps another non-Windows subnotebook) you *have* to go for the E220.  That's the only one that works out-of-the-box.  The direct link to the offer is for a different Huawei dongle but thanks to some resourceful folk on the deal's comments page you'll be able to select the E220 without any problems.

*Keep away from 720p video podcasts on Miro and you'll be fine!

Orange have hardly been a leader in the mobile data market.  They've previously been pricey, unreliable and less than generous.  However things would appear to be changing for the better.  They've just announced they'll be offering the Eee PC 900 sub-notebook for "free" when you take up their mobile broadband at £25 per month for 2 years.  That's £600 in total but you are getting a laptop that retails at around £270 now and a fairly generous 3GB of data a month.

Like a lot of these deals, whether from carriers or retailers, they might not seem so generous a year down the line when the laptop seems a little dated and newer customers get better deals (like increased allowances) but I guess that's the same as when you buy a phone on contract.