3 Mobile Broadband takes on wi-fi in Birmingham
Birmingham based blogger Peter C Ashton has recently taken delivery of a trial dongle and has posted a lengthy article on his first experiences using it. One of Peter’s main concerns of mobile internet usage is the lack of free wi-fi access, so he was hoping the 3 dongle would circumvent this problem, and it seems to have done so. Though he was “very skeptical about allowing mobile phone companies to control the last mile of mobile internet” he has found the 3G service from 3 is “not bad at all”.
Though Peter was initially concerned about using the dongle with his MacBook, it turned out that “There are a few niggles but on the whole it just works”. He does have a couple of issues, such as not being able to see a list of available networks or the signal strength and the uploading/downloading speed, but on the whole Peter got on well with the dongle, concluding “until we have a true city-wide free wifi mesh then the 3g dongle is, if not essential then very useful for the laptop swinging digital nomad”. Jump on over to Peter’s blog to read the full story.
Permanent link Trackback
Leave a comment Read comment
Don, May 8th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
The 3 Broadband modem generally works well. However we wanted to use them to access our works server from mobile laptops and found a problem. We use Microsoft Web Workspace and this requires use of a particular port. We found the modem would not work into our VPN as it appears that 3 block use of this particular port on their system (can’t remember the number of the port just now). It is true that we can access our mail by Web mail but we cannot get into the Server proper and therfore found it unusable. We have been told by Vodfone and O2 that they do not block this port but have not been able to test for that. This is a good useful device but do be warned it does not suit everything.