Interesting, is all I can say about day two. After the performance of broadband on day one I was really looking forward to firing it up yesterday and having a good play on it. Speed again, wasn’t really an issue at all, when I was connected it was all 3G and going pretty fast. There was one random disconnection during the day and then rather a lot of them later in the evening.

As the day moved on I had to go to the Silverlink retail park in North Shields to get a bit of reading material. Silverlink is home to a Borders store, and most Borders shops have a nice little Starbucks in there – where better to do a bit of public browsing. The signal in Starbucks was low at best, but it didn’t really slow me down. I had a look on the Ofcom Sitefinder again to find out where the closest masts were and that sort of explained why the signal was low, take a look:

After my trek to Borders, I went into the centre of Newcastle. While I was in there I had a nice chat with the Store Manager, Stuart. He told me that in most Vodafone shops, they have a Vodafone Signal Booster, which takes the Vodafone signal and boosts it. They’re available to buy in the home, too. Just to check that it was true, I went and sat outside the shop and surprise, surprise I have Optimal HSDPA+ signal.

Although I noticed a massive speed increase, speed tests still said I was going at only 0.2Mbps – bull in my opinion.

So, onto the tasks that I performed in the day:

• Had a video call on Skype
• Downloaded Fedora
• Streamed Music
• Public place browsing

Skype Calling

The call quality was really good, probably the same as on a normal connection. Didn’t really disconnect much, which was also a plus.

Download Fedora
Because of the nature of mobile broadband, I had to download a download manager to accomplish this task, because if I hadn’t, then if I disconnected half way through then I’d have to start from the beginning. Took me a healthy 2 hours and 20 minutes of 690MB glory – I also disconnected once during the download – good job I could resume.

Streamed Music
The same as yesterday but using a different protocol – Spotify. This experience was seamless – hardly any buffer time.

Public Place Browsing
I used my connection in a coffee shop – took a few connection attempts, but once I was on it was quite a pleasant experience.

So what have I learned today? Well for one, bandwidth consuming tasks can be achieved if there’s a good connection and that if you do opt to buying mobile broadband, a download manager is pretty essential – the one I use is called Speed Download for Mac, which actually does provide boosted speed.

- PS, sorry this is a day late, got slightly delayed!