Mobile broadband

[David Cantrell]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 02:57:27PM +0900, Simon Cozens wrote:
> 
> I'm coming back to the UK in January and will be moving around a lot
> until we buy a house in May. Some of the places we'll be going won't
> have Internet access and I think I'll need it to work, (anyone know of
> any telecommute Perl contracts then, please let me know...) so I'm
> thinking about getting a mobile broadband thingy, partially for working
> on the move and partially to avoid starting and stopping lots of DSL
> contracts. Does this make sense?
> 
> Anyone got any experience of mobile broadband providers? Any good ones,
> good deals, horror stories, don't-use-this-if-you-have-a-Mac stories,
> etc.?

My experience of Voodoofone's 3G coverage was so bad that I dumped
them, even though their voice coverage is excellent.  I changed to
T-mobile, whose data coverage is a bit better, but still not great (but
at least it works in York city centre).  I can't really recommend either
of them at least for 3G.

But do you really need 3G?  In extremis, you can get 9.6k over the bog
standard GSM voice connection, which will work just about everywhere on
Vodafone.  Modern phones might not like doing that, but I know the
venerable Nokia 6310i does it just fine.  9.6k is sufficient for an ssh
connection, if you can live without graphics most of the time.

As for don't-use-this-if-you-have-a-Mac, OS X.5 has better support for
using mobile phones.  At least, it works with my Treo, where X.4
wouldn't.

-- 
David Cantrell | top google result for "internet beard fetish club"

comparative and superlative explained:

<Huhn> worse, worser, worsest, worsted, wasted