3MB loves to reference any piece of cinematic history, and that is what Top Gun is. So when Stephen Waddington titled his 3 mobile broadband ‘Need for Speed‘ we were prompted to re-enact some key scenes and listen to Kenny Loggins - ace.

Recently, Stephen was able to give his 3 dongle some testing while out on the road as he has begun to favour the 3G connection over Wi-Fi. While not always as quick, rarely does he struggle to get a connection and subscribing to a 3G operator as opposed to multiple Wi-Fi suppliers is definitely better value.

His first test was on the M3 where connection didn’t drop once and he was able to browse the web comfortably. There were moments where speeds did fall beneath 1mps, however, which meant that the VPN connection to his office suffered and Outlook froze. The next test was on the train from Paddington to Reading where the connection wasn’t as quick and dropped twice, which highlighted a fault as Stephen manually reconnected. He considered that due to the inevitability of a modem disconnecting the lack of a setting for automatic reconnection appears to be an oversight. In the article are graphs detailing the finer nuances of the dongles performance should such things take your fancy.

Despite still being keen to test the dongle in further locations, Stephen is confident enough to conclude with “Granted 3G speeds are not always as fast Wi-Fi but the ease of connection and low cost makes this a Wi-Fi killer.” Yeeha, Jester’s dead!