I'm a bit surprised by the complaints of patchy 3G coverage - sure, it is patchy, I don't think it's designed for 100% saturation of the land area of the UK - but surely the modem can fall back to 2.5G GPRS/EDGE if 3G is not available?

A 3G *only* dongle sounds about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

I have found that with both Voda and Orange, siites which use Ajax (and vanilla javascript calls) are broken--e..g gmail and gcalendar, amongst others. 

I assume this must be due to crappy gateways on their side.

This is just a rant about lack of 3G at Loughborough isn't it Editor?

I use the T-Mobile USB 3G £99 device. 
I use it for emergency Internet backup should our ADSL line go down and the company needs basic Internet service quickly.

OK, its limited to 2Mb/s and a silly 3GB a month download. But I looked up its coverage *before* I bought it and asked T-Mobile if I could get a a refund if it didn't work in my area.

They said yes.

But it works very well in our steel clad office and I can connect it to any Windows XP laptop with USB2 and simply configure it in a couple of minutes to pretend it's our ADSL router.

The device even has a storage device built-in so no need to carry around a CD to configure it.

This isn't a free review so I'll stop there. :-)


No mention of vodafone, good price, good speed...

Why not buy a phone such as the Nokia E51 and use it as a modem? You get the same data costs but can connect using HSDPA or 3.5G or whatever it's called these days. Much faster.

3 do a 12 month (3-gigabyte limit per month) free-dongle deal for 15 quid a month, which I took up.
Fine if you're living in a major town or city, as it connects over 3G or HSDPA with decent strength, any rural area (particularly in the North) and it's less useful than brick.

My 3 experience is that download data rates with HSDPA, while good, are typically less than a 1 Mbit ADSL fixed line.
On 3G, I seem to get capped upload at about 6-7KB/s so it takes ages to upload photos etc.
Latency is still very noticeable - useless for gaming - mobile broadband is nowhere near as 'snappy' as regular broadband in general browsing.

The Huawei dongle software works OK but is shockingly badly written: it continually reads/writes to your hard disk (or SSD), using files to pass data presumably between threads (FileMon typically shows about 5-30 read/modify/writes per second).

Not sure why you forgot the biggest mobile provider in the UK!?

I was seriously pissed with Vodafone for refusing to allow me to use my existing HSDPA 3G modem (N95) and being forced into another contract. I told them I would cancel and move to T-Mobile flex if they didn't provide the £100 modem for free, which they did although on a 24 month/3GB Limit/£12.77 per month contract. 

What they forget to tell anyone who doesn't throw their toys out of the pram, is that after 6 months you can reduce to £0 per month on pay as you go. So if you find a better deal, do not use it and it's free for the last 18 months!

Even in some crummy village in south wales with very poor to poor reception I get 1MB down and 300K up, according to adslguide.org.uk.

Not a bad deal!

What about Vodafone?

We have about 30 Vodafone 3G cards where I work. It costs £25 a month, unlimited data use (but really 4gig when you press them) and the coverage is pretty damn good.

The guys on the road love them


Think yourself lucky you can get standard services. There's still many well populated areas which have no standard service or very poor standard service. This of course is despite all the coverage maps claiming otherwise.

Wao what a surprise? Even in the UK, I can't download DVD iso Linux? The 3 GB limit is just so small, event a DVD iso Linux could not enough.