Low signal? Stop. Smart management of the connection, cuts off bad connections. Image © XiXiDu

Well for the pat few days I haven’t updated, though there is a reason for it. Firstly I haven’t been on the internet very much for a few days so there wouldn’t have been very much to talk about and secondly, when I have managed to get onto the net, my broadband hasn’t been able to hold up the connection very well.

As far as I can figure there’s a reason for this, too. The signal that I’ve been exposed to for the past few days has been very limited, below 10% in most cases, because of this it’s likely that there will be a lot of data being lost in transmission and therefore the broadband, being smart, figures that there’s no point in trying to maintain a connection where pieces of data are going to be lost – no connection is better than a faulty connection.

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Day three in my experiment and things went a little bit down hill. It took me up to five minutes sometimes to find a signal, even though I knew there was one around and even once I’d connected I experienced problems.

I’m not sure whether it’s a network mechanism or not. What I mean by this is, because I’ve been a very heavy user (an hours worth of Skype calling and I’d uploaded 1GB of data) the network might have measures in place to make sure the weight of dragging me along didn’t affect other users. This could make a lot of sense, by cutting off and slowing down heavy users at peak times, you encourage them to use their home internet or not to use it at all.

Having said this, I did manage to get a few successful connections that stayed open until I myself closed them. I didn’t really perform any really heavy tasks yesterday, simply because the speed and availability wasn’t always there.

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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:

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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…)

You probably know by now that I’m doing an experiment with mobile broadband to see if I can use it as my primary internet connection, constantly for a week and whether mobile broadband is able to cope with the huge amounts of data that some applications and users consume.

Ofcom provide a mini map of base stations in any given area.

Today is my starting day and what better to do, than to find out where I can get a good signal around my area. Most carriers provide some sort of coverage map on their website, but in my experience they’re not always accurate. So what other tools are there available on the internet to find out how strong your signal is going to be, and whether you’ll achieve 3G speeds or not?

Back in 2001, the UK Government commissioned an online site finder tool. This tool allows you to locate all of the base stations in a given area. By doing this, you can see just how far away you are from a mast and then figure out by common sense what sort of service you’ll be expecting to get. The tool is now operated by telecommunications regulator Ofcom and can be found on their website, or by searching Google for “ofcom site finder”. (more…)

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. (more…)