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On Friday 13 February 2009 11:01:30 Steve Lee wrote: > Off on a bit of a tangent, I'm looking at mobile broadband for ADSL > backup and occasional trips. It seems to be a toss up between > Vodaphone and T-Mobile PAYG offers. Does anyone have experience or > thoughts on using with Ubuntu (naturally they say you need Win or Mac > but searches show support from Ubuntu is good)? Oh I'm in Exeter and > coverage looks ok. > > Steve Lee I've been doing some comparisons for work. Ubuntu 8.10 Network Manager handles mobile broadband very well. Prior to that I was using wvdial. I've used Vodafone contract and Three PAYG. Three have the cheapest PAYG £10 for 1Gb or 1 month, whichever comes sooner. The coverage of both is poor where I live. I've tried using it on the train and given up as it is so unreliable. "mobile" means "somewhere else", not "on the move" I think. I've used my phone for GSM connections with better results frankly. I've only seen the advertised bandwidth once or twice. Once in central London. The real issue is coverage here. Don't believe their maps. Mostly it is a painfully slow dribble of data with frequent stalls. But maybe I'm unlucky in my choice of places. Think ping times of 10s when it is bad. Slow, but tolerable otherwise. The other problem is drivers. Huawei E220 and E172 work out of the box. For more modern units, like the k3760, you will need drivers. But I've had all these working under Ubuntu. But it is better than nothing. The other funny thing is that the Three website won't let me pay online. The web session failed when I was first typing my details in, and now it won't let me register "a card at a different address from your first card", when my first card is probably at something like "(null)". Their phone "support", which is uniformly terrible, said there must be something wrong with my card, which there isn't. So I have to buy those top up vouchers and type them in. Probably more secure than letting them have my card details anyway. The bandwidth has never been good enough for me to get anywhere near the 1Gb limit. I'm lucky if I can get 200M a month out of it (using it perhaps 10 evenings a month) D -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html