TOPIC: ORANGE UK
Trying out Irish Mobile Broadband
2nd January 2012Over the course of a year, I end up visiting Ireland a few times, so I decided to invest in a Meteor PAYG broadband stick to see how I'd get on with it. For €20, you can get a 30-day pass with 7.5 GB downloading capacity, a more generous offer than you'd get with some UK mobile networks (T-Mobile really comes to mind here). Signal strength was strong wherever I tried it too with 3G being available so long as you are in the right place with EDGE being the lowest that I got otherwise. Download speeds are good too so it turned out to be a good investment of €30 to get the Huawei E173 USB dongle (I had a T-Mobile one of these before that no longer works, so I am keeping an eye on reliability with this one; though the design seems a little different, I am getting OK so far) and €20 of credit that comes with it. After all, anything's better than the punitive roaming rates that UK providers charge.
Exploring the option of mobile broadband
20th September 2010Last week, I decided to buy and experiment with a Vodafone PAYG mobile broadband dongle (the actual device is a ZTE K3570-Z) partly as a backup for my usual broadband (it has had its moments recently) and partly to allow me to stay more connected while on the move. Thoughts of blogging and checking up on email or the real-time web while travelling to and from different places must have swayed me.
Hearing that the use of Windows or OS X with the device had me attempting to hook up the device to Windows 7 running within a VirtualBox virtual machine on my main home computer. When that proved too big a request from the software setup, I went googling out of curiosity and found that there was a way to get the thing going with Linux. While I am not so sure that it works with Ubuntu without any further adjustments, my downloading of a copy of the Sakis3G script was enough to do the needful, and I was online from my main OS after all. So much for what is said on the box...
More success was had with Windows 7 as loaded on my Toshiba Equium notebook, with setting up and connections being as near to being effortless as these things can be. Ubuntu is available on there too, courtesy of Wubi, and the Sakis3G trick didn't fail for that either.
That's not to say that mobile broadband doesn't have its limitations, as I found. For instance, Subversion protocols and Wubi installations aren't supported, but that may be a result of non-support of IPv6 than anything else. Nevertheless, connection speeds are good as far as I can see, though I yet have to test out the persistence of Vodafone's network while constantly on the move. Having seen how flaky T-Mobile's network can be in the U.K. as I travel around using my BlackBerry, that is something that needs doing, yet all seems painless enough so far. However, the fact that Vodafone uses the more usual mobile phone frequency may be a help.