Does anyone use mobile broadband, does it work ok and if so who are you with. Thanks

sis-in-law uses Vodafone’s service. Works ok, simple to set up, etc.

We’ve just sent back a Virgin one, dongle just wouldn’t connect-to anything!

got the vodafone one, works okay

Thanks, so far its vodafone then

I use 3, and must be one of the very lucky few who it works 🙂

I have been using a vodafone one for the last few months and had been very happy with it. However in the last couple of weeks I keep finding the transfer rate drops right down, often going down to zero. The slow connection is making it hard to log on to services such as google mail and some other things, which now object to the slowness of my connection and won’t load unless I go back to ‘basic mail service’ etc. If I log out and back on it improves briefly, then goes back to frequently hopeless. It is dire at peak times, but still problematic these days even off peak. I thought it was my kit, but my housemate is getting all the same symptoms with his set up (same supplier) and another friend in different Bristol/Bath area who is using a ‘3’ dongle is getting the same type of problems in the last few weeks.

I am wondering if the sudden uptake of mobile broadband has caused the networks to hit some kind of data transfer saturation point?

If you are used to dial up, well I’d imagine it’s great. If you are used to actual broadband then you will probably find it infuriating. I’m with orange, frankly it does my head in and I cant help but wonder why I got it. It constantly times out, you have to constantly disconnect and reconnect. Refresh and stop pages etc.

Speed wise I’d put it at less than 2 meg. Maybe 512k to 1.5 meg on a very very good day, upload speeds are abysmal, maybe 100 kbs. I can just about attach a 1 meg file to an email after maybe 20 mins or so. Often many aborted attempts.

It’s a pain in the hole to be honest. With all the ads and animated banners etc stw for example takes between 30 seconds and a minute to refresh pages. Bizarrely it’s much quicker on a mac than pc.

been using three for about 8 months now and the service is very good – stays connected for 9-10 hours at a stretch with good speed and no drop outs. The three dongles roam across onto Orange’s 3G network as part of a roaming agreement which means you get really good coverage at no extra cost.

I bought the 1 year all inclusive pack – dongle and 12Gb of data with a 1 year usage period for £99. I’ve still got 4Gb left despite having used it for work all day every day for 8 months.

I have a 3 contract one and its excellent. I bought a vodafone pay as you go jobbie thinking it would better. It was utter carp. Slow to connect, low transfer rates. It may have just been a contract v pay as you go thing, but I was far from impressed. I get 3 gig per month for £11 from 3 🙂

It all depends on where you are planning to use it.

At home i had to stay in a certain place to get anything like a reliable enough signal to use it. Even then it was way to unreliable and slow.

If i ever wanted to download or send anything big, i took it to work. The thing flew along and was quite impressive. I could watch BBCi player quite happily on it.

If i were you i wouldnt sign up to anything untill you have ‘tried’ it on someone elses. These companies should be forced to give a demonstrator model for a week to show its reliable. At present i think you get about 24hrs and its not enough.

Just re-read what I wrote last night and I would stress the service was very good and very fast until the last couple of weeks.

I’ve just signed up to 02 as I live in a shared house with about 5 other people and getting a proper connection would be too much hassle.

First off, speed is very variable. It depends on what networks are around for it to connect to. If it can connect to the 3G network, speeds aren’t too bad (10k-20k/s). If it can only connect to the 2G network, speeds are abysmal. It does also drop the connection sometimes.

It does an annoying thing called “image optimisation” where the quality of all jpegs is reduced to use less bandwidth. You can up the quality of individual images (say, if you’d copying an image off the ‘net) but it’s a faff and it doesn’t always work. You can’t switch it off either unless you’re prepared to do some tinkering with your browser’s configuration. I’m still trying to figure out how to do this with Firefox – the previous fix people were using (an add-on that lets you reconfigure the header info for web pages) isn’t compatible with the new version.

If you have a CRT monitor then the dongle can interfere with this in the same way as a mobile phone.

For what it is, it’s a bit expensive and unreliable, but it does seem to work OK for me at the moment.

Midnighthour – Member
Just re-read what I wrote last night and I would stress the service was very good and very fast until the last couple of weeks.

same here with T-Mobile, my GF went into the shop at the weekend to ask if there was a fault and they said that there was a problem with the network they were trying to fix…

3 here, been OK when I have used it – but I haven’t used it much tbh.

Real test coming up soon with a week’s holiday in the borders.

If in shared rented accomodation, get landlord to supply BB. Lump it into rent if need be.

chapaking that’s exactly what I want it for but generally it seems that its not too good yet, which is a shame as it seems ideal. Just checked the 3 coverage for dumfries and it says it’s very good so who knows ?