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…)

Mobile Broadband for a whole week, sponsored by Vodafone.

Back in the day of my old blog I tried to do an experiment to see if mobile broadband could withstand the usage of an Internet junkie like myself and was getting some pretty positive results. The experiment was to see if I could use Mobile Broadband as my primary internet connection for a month.

Unfortunately the experiment was never completed, so now I’m going to try it again. After evaluating the last attempt, I think that initially a month is far too long to try to use Mobile Broadband exclusively. So instead I’m going to try for a week initially and slowly build up over the course of the year – I reckon that if I get used to it I could use it full time.

Also, this time I’m going to keep a log book of the sorts of things that comes through my connection, so for example if I go on webcam, or if I watch a show on the iPlayer or even watch a YouTube video, I will record it.

To help me with this task I’ve teamed up with Vodafone who have provided me with the Mobile Broadband coverage. If you want to get involved with the experiment or decide that you want to go mobile, then head over the Vodafone store and get it.

The test starts very soon, so wish me luck!