After a recent disaster of epic proportions that was made all the worse by not having an Internet connection, I bought myself a USB Mobile Broadband Modem – all the mobile phone shops are touting them at the moment but I decided (not sure why) to get mine direct from Three. Ordered it late on Wednesday afternoon and it arrived on Friday morning.
It’s bigger than a USB memory stick but not massively so. I plumped for the white one which looks rather spiffing, and it comes with a white USB extension cable, a few leaflets and a SIM card. It mounts as a CD-Rom drive and the software is on the stick itself, so no discs to lose. Your SIM fits in a tight little jacket which slides into the unit just below the USB connector and stays out of sight from there on. There’s also a MicroSD slot, so it can act as a regular USB memory stick as well.
Three USB Modem
Three USB Modem
Three USB Modem
The first time I plugged it in the internal memory mounted. Double-clicking on it auto-booted the installer and… That was it. No muss no fuss. The software checks for updates (which I downloaded over Wifi rather than use up my allowance) and is generally unobtrusive, comprising a small window with a network status display and a big red Connect/Disconnect button.
I connected to 3G on the first attempt despite only having three bars. Access was impressively quick – this one goes up to 2.8Mb I think – and there were no problems connecting over Telnet or anything like that. It pretty much did exactly what it said on the tin.
Three USB Software
A couple of months ago I installed a bandwidth meter on my small laptop and found that I used 1.3GB (combined up/down) over the 30 day trial period of the software. Since I use WiFi and even wired where possible, I can quite easily get away with just 1GB a month, costing me a ternner, without worrying about extra charges.
So far so good! I’ve done a little bit of web browsing on it and checked my email while doing 60mph on the M180 (no, not driving) and it’s all been spot on so far.
Update: 10th November
There was a brief period of about half an hour this morning where there was no three network available at all and I couldn’t connect. It was annoying that I actually wanted to do something at that time as well. It’s back on now (using it to post in fact).