For anyone unclear about the aim of my experiment, it’s to decide whether or not mobile broadband is fit to be used mainstream. Yesterday was my first day and was a day to try the ins and outs of the product.

For a first day venturing into the land of the mobile went rather well, I could complete most tasks without fail and without really having to wait for pages to load. Speed tests indicated that I wasn’t really browsing too fast and said that my latency was quite high, but to be honest I didn’t really notice while I was browsing.

The first few connection attempts to the network lasted only a few minutes and sometimes didn’t even connect, after unplugging it and plugging it back in, it found a juicy 3G connection and remained connected for 5 hours – I was the one who ended the connection this time.

Mobile feels like 10Mb fiber at a busy time in the day

For anyone who is reading this and wants a flavour of what using mobile broadband feels like, imagine you’re on a 10Mb connection from Virgin Media and it’s 7PM, everyone has just got home from work and have gone online, while all the kids in your area have decided to play WoW. That’s honestly how it feels – just like a normal connection that is being strained a little.

If I’m honest, I did use a little bit more bandwidth hungry applications today than I usually would to see just how it would hold up. Here’s a nice little log of the things that I did:

• Internet Connection Sharing
• Streaming music from last.fm
• Watched an episode of Inu Yasha on Youtube
• Uploaded images and files to a website
• Began to download Fedora

Let’s go into each in a bit more detail, shall we? (more…)