OF THE END!!!! No, only joking, but have a guess as to what it could be? Yep, it’s the beginning of my mobile broadband experiment, sponsored by Vodafone. There have been some questions about this, which I will come to later in the post.

I received a package yesterday morning, I’m quite used to packages because I do order quite a bit off the net, so it wasn’t really that much of a surprise – name, address and a little blue sticker on it. I knew it was something I’d been waiting a while for, my dongle.

There’s only 5 things in the box it comes in:

1. The dongle itself
2. An extension cable, so if you’re like me and your USB ports are arranged silly you can still have two things in at once.
3. A user manual
4. A Safety Manual
5. A disc for Windows Users containing drivers.

It was quite an easy install really, pop the modem into the Mac, run an installer and then badaboom! I’m done, though I expect on Windows you need to put the CD in, instead. I did need to get used to it a bit before I start my experiment properly, so I decided that I’d have a quick play on it and see what it’s like. It wasn’t working at first, but a restart of the Mac gave it the kick it needed – looking back, the installer did say it wouldn’t work without a restart.

First impressions: the connection itself seems rather fast, zipping around the internet as if I’m on normal broadband; the connection does drop a little bit and when it clouds over I only get GPRS signal; speed tests indicate that it’s going VERY slow, but frankly, I think it’s quite the opposite with speed tests saying that I’m going at 25KBps and downloads peaked at 172KBps.

To see the images of the day, just look below, all with captions and titles – lovely. The experiment starts on Monday, so wish me luck!

P.S. Sorry for the image quality.