Author: bryan hunt Date: To: stephen.davies, Hampshire LUG Discussion List Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Mobile Broadband routers (bryan hunt)
On Fri, 2011-03-04 at 13:03 +0000, Stephen Davies wrote: > I have to say that the reply by Bryan did seem to have a lot of
> bitterness in it. That may well be down to personal experience.
Perceptive, and true.
> I've been using a 3 mobile 3G dongle for over a year now. I pay £15.32
> month for 15Gbytes of data. More than enough for me I can assure you.
> I have two devices where I use the 3G sim card. They are still selling
> the 15Gb package for £15.98. I generally download 3-4Gb a month, mostly
> using iPlayer.
2GB unlimited, I was thinking of the mobile phone offering, your pricing
is correct. I presume with subscription they still charge 50p per MB
excess charge. I've never been hit by this but it did cause some
nervousness on my part. >
> 1) In the standard USB dongle.
> 2) In the MIFI device.
>
> I use the second one when I want to connect more than one device over
> 3G. The MIFI unit gives me a wifi connection from the
> PC/laptop/ipad/android tablet to the unit. Then up to 5 devices can use
> the same 3G connection
I've used both, USB dongle first, then MIFI when I thought I couldn't
connect, turned out the local base-station was down that month, 4 hours
of troubleshooting, 10 quid free credit for inconvenience (unused).
> Problems?
>
> -The signal is diabolical around Portobello Rd. The Vodafone signal is a
> lot better.
My experience, signal is bad in most of South London, Farnborough and
Frimley Green. In fact everywhere I've ever tried to connect it.
> - You have to modify the outgoing connection for email to route it via
> your carrier. Otherwise the port is blocked. This is due to SPAM.
Ah yes, I forgot about the arbitrary port blocking, although SMTP may be
authenticated on port 25, they block it unilaterally. Result, you need a
virtual machine somewhere and VPN both of which push up your costs or
just use the GMail web interface....
> Support?
> Never needed any (So far, touch wood).
And I hope you never need to, I say that as a Three customer for the
past 19 months...
> I tried mobile broadband a while ago with Vodafone. it was crap even on
> Windows. Things have moved on a lot since then.
Vodafone deploy a layer of 'transparent' proxy servers which among other
things mess with HTTP conversations. One 'amusing' consequence of which
was an inability to commit to SVN (yes I know, company should have used
TLS) because Vodaphone were screwing up the headers....
> If you have the MIFI device you don't have to worry about PPP and all
> that 'stuff'... Nice and simple really.
It also comes with a single, unchangeable password, normal procedure of
regular password changing is a no-no... See earlier point regarding 50p
per MB.
> Just my 2p worth.
