Ubiquitous mobile broadband
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It seems that customer work is taking me over to Ireland quite a bit at the moment. In fact, I'll be here, on and off, until May at least. So I though it was probably time to check out 3G offerings in Ireland.
In the UK, I've got a contract T-Mobile 3G card. Unlimited data per month, for not-very-much. It is, without doubt, THE most important thing in my bar, bar my laptop. I use it pretty much every single day I'm away, and without it I wouldn't be in touch half as much as I am. The only downside with it is that roaming charges are huge. So if I'm not in the UK, then you won't see me using it. So, I thought I'd take a look at the Irish offerings.
It turns out that all 4 major carriers over here do Pay-As-You-Go/Pay-and-Go/PAYG/Prepay/whatever-you-call-it 3G broadband deals. So after a bit of research, I'm up and running with a Meteor connection and a new Huaweii E180 flippy-usb modem-stick thing. The total price? 79Euro, or $99, or 70GBP. Then on top of that, it's €3/day. At a usual price of €12 a pop, each time I use Wifi in the hotel or airport, I'll be saving money by the 8th time I use it. Which could well be only 3 or 4 days. I'm also getting just short of 1Mb/sec down too.
Of course, this isn't that new - but I did manage (I think) to get both my UK 3G connection and my Ireland 3G connection working on the same laptop. The trick? DON'T install both sets of software. If the modems are similar, then use one set of software and a separate dial-up connection from Network Prefs. I needed to install the software in a VM to take the PIN number off the SIM card, but then it works just fine without any software. If you're really interested, the settings were:
Number: *99# (default 'connect to network' number for all GSM phones)
Username: blank
Password: blank
And that was it. Now for my question - WHY CAN'T I GET THIS IN THE USA!! I don't even need (or want) the modem - just the SIM card.... Surely there's a market for a global version of this as well? It's not like I actually need my data routing back through my home network. Just hit the tower and dump the data to the local Internet, surely?
Bookmark :
It seems that customer work is taking me over to Ireland quite a bit at the moment. In fact, I'll be here, on and off, until May at least. So I though it was probably time to check out 3G offerings in Ireland.
In the UK, I've got a contract T-Mobile 3G card. Unlimited data per month, for not-very-much. It is, without doubt, THE most important thing in my bar, bar my laptop. I use it pretty much every single day I'm away, and without it I wouldn't be in touch half as much as I am. The only downside with it is that roaming charges are huge. So if I'm not in the UK, then you won't see me using it. So, I thought I'd take a look at the Irish offerings.
It turns out that all 4 major carriers over here do Pay-As-You-Go/Pay-and-Go/PAYG/Prepay/whatever-you-call-it 3G broadband deals. So after a bit of research, I'm up and running with a Meteor connection and a new Huaweii E180 flippy-usb modem-stick thing. The total price? 79Euro, or $99, or 70GBP. Then on top of that, it's €3/day. At a usual price of €12 a pop, each time I use Wifi in the hotel or airport, I'll be saving money by the 8th time I use it. Which could well be only 3 or 4 days. I'm also getting just short of 1Mb/sec down too.
Of course, this isn't that new - but I did manage (I think) to get both my UK 3G connection and my Ireland 3G connection working on the same laptop. The trick? DON'T install both sets of software. If the modems are similar, then use one set of software and a separate dial-up connection from Network Prefs. I needed to install the software in a VM to take the PIN number off the SIM card, but then it works just fine without any software. If you're really interested, the settings were:
Number: *99# (default 'connect to network' number for all GSM phones)
Username: blank
Password: blank
And that was it. Now for my question - WHY CAN'T I GET THIS IN THE USA!! I don't even need (or want) the modem - just the SIM card.... Surely there's a market for a global version of this as well? It's not like I actually need my data routing back through my home network. Just hit the tower and dump the data to the local Internet, surely?
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Posted by Turtle At 14:15:18 On 24/03/2009 | - Website - |