Word of the Day: sarsenet - gentle
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UK 3G ISPs need to get house in order
MOBILE BROADBAND in Blighty is a minefield where it is vital that you shop around and look at the fine print.
Several companies out there are advertising big things with their 3G offerings with lashings of dongles out there promising to do wonderful things to your laptop.
Setting up the INQ's Loughborough satellite, we were stuck with having to wait more than two weeks for a BT engineer to show up and connect a phone line before we could get anything like a broadband connection.
Obviously a good way forward would be to go for one of these mobile broadband 3G thingies. Most of the offerings are for between 15 and 18 of your English pounds a month, so all perfectly liveable with. Until you actually take your chequebook for a walk.
First up was O2 which boasts the biggest 3G coverage in all of Britain. It will flog you a dongle for £30, which is double the likes of Orange and T-Mobile. However, unlike those two, it says downloads are not capped at 3GB per month.
It would sound like a goodish deal, but if you look at the fine print, if you go over 3GB you would be breaching O2's fair use policy and be deemed naughty in its sight. So not capped, but not exactly unlimited access either.
Then came the biggest kicker to the plan. O2's coverage of Loughborough is pants. It does cover the university and a few areas where students hang out, but the rest of us mortals have to suffer non-broadband speeds.
So you pay double for a service you cannot use. There really is no excuse for O2 not to have upgraded its 3G coverage by now, and we would not have found this out until we got the service home.
Next up came Orange, which did offer coverage for the part of Loughborough where we are based. However it decided that INQ reporters newly arrived from Bulgaria were such a credit risk they would not touch us with a bargepole even if we offered to pay for a year's subscription up front. The same applied to T-Mobile, although we didn't check to see if we were covered there.
This left the outfit '3', which made us pay a £150 deposit and sign an 18 month contract. It was capped at 3GB.
Since it was that or sitting by a dustbin by the only open wi-fi connection in Loughborough, we decided it was a good idea. [But surely that's how you find most of your stories - Ed]
There was a threat that it could take up to 24 hours to connect our SIM card but the service was up and running by the time the dongle was back in the office.
Running 3G on a laptop is an uneven experience. Some Web pages work better than others at different times. Last night we were having an mare of a job trying to get it to open webmail pages. Although this morning all was well with the universe.
It seems that the 3G ISP market is still in its infancy. Mobile phone outfits still have not got their heads around the potential they have here. In the case of O2 it has just decided to attempt to cherry-pick the best sites and charge the earth for the service. In other cases the outfits have not really worked out that they could make a killing by upgrading the bandwidth on their sites and taking BT out of the loop completely. µ
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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.