At 6pm i tried to have a online chat with web cam and it kept getting disconected from messanger. I ran a speed test and i was getting 30kbs download. it has now been at the same speed since then, even though i have a full signal showing on my 3 usb program interface.

The reason i got this product was so that i could keep in contact with my family (web cams) and with the advertised speeds i thought this product would be the answer to my communication problems…….but looks like i was wrong. Its not like i live out in the countryside. I live in the centre of a city.

I feel cheated and dissapointed!!!

If the only way that you can predict how suitable one mobile volume ‘package’ is going to be is to try it out and carefully monitor your usage on a regular basis, then that just illustrates what needs improving. Why would you have to do that kind of activity when it would be better for the customer if the tool did that for you?

Looks like Vodafone is one step ahead as Sarah notes. I didn’t know Vodafone already provided the means to see your account status, rudimentary and half-baked it might currently be. (I actually asked two friends who have Vodafone mobile broadband sticks about such information, and they weren’t aware of it!)

Everyone needs to do far better.

Interestingly for you my other half has a Vodafone USB 3G dongle. This came with some installer software which does monitor your usage and has limits set on amount of data used. In this you can set your own limits so you then know that you are say 1gb away from your download limit for this month. (I think it did this on a month by month basis… but would have to check)

This in itself is a useful tool to stop you from hitting limits. The only problem is that when you first get it the limit is set to 512mb… yep you heard that right! Crazy huh… many people will use this device and suddenly under normal usage it will hit that limit and you won’t be able to do anything! No internet! Shock horror! So in that sense Vodafone are a bit cheeky. Many people wouldn’t know that it’s the management software doing this or even where to go to change the settings.

Personally I don’t much like this approach and yes open information on what people are really getting rather than theoretical max would be great!

An interesting post, thanks.

I agree with you that trying to define the quantity of service you’re going to get in terms of ‘how many emails’, etc is fairly meaningless. I can understand why vendors use these sort of measures, as there isn’t perhaps any other simple, comprehendable measure that could easily be applied. There’s no equivalent of ‘pages per minute’ as you have with printers (though that measure in itself could be considered questionable – what is a ‘page’?).

I think the difficulty with these mobile broadband packages is that you’re simply buying a fixed volume of data that you can transfer, which you have to use up over a fixed period. This isn’t like wired broadband where essentially the delivery rate is determined by the size of the ‘pipe’ that you’re connecting through and you don’t generally have any kind of ‘total volume over a period’ limit (though that may come as ISPs struggle to meet constantly growing demand).

I suspect that the only way that you can predict how suitable one mobile volume ‘package’ is going to be for you is to try it out and carefully monitor your usage on a regular basis, perhaps every day and see how much you’ve used and try and judge if it will last for the period you’ve got it available for.

This is certainly something that I think you could reasonably expect the service provider to do for you, perhaps by the mechanisms you suggest with the mobile unit doing the calculation and presentation of this information.

I’m currently trying out the PAYG version of the 3 mobile service, with the 3Gb package. I’m ‘budgeting’ my use each day at 100Mb, to see how that works out. I’ve been using the service for 8 days now and have used 870Mb before connecting up this evening, so I’m resaonably on target. I’m just using it for web browsing, email, twittering, fetching RSS and some small-ish downloads (like episode 344). My experience so far is that it performs perfectly acceptably for these uses, response times are fine with only the occasional longer delay (which could be a congestion issue elsewhere).

The only aspects of this PAYG service that I would like to see changed is for it to work in the same way as the phone PAYG service does, in that you can top up whenever you want and there isn’t really any time limit of usage. At present, if I use up my 3Gb in 20 days I have to wait a further 10 days before I can purchase another 1/3/7 Gb package to apply. If I do top up during those 10 days the data usage is charged at the standard non-package rate, which is considerably higher. Conversely, if I don’t use up all my quota within 30 days I lose the unused portion. I’d be interested to hear 3’s justifications for applying these limits to the PAYG broadband service.

For the Linux users out there, I’m using the unit on my OpenSuse 10.3 machine and it’s working happily.

You don’t get all the onscreen usage info that you do under Windows, but the website gives you sufficent information to monitor usage.

Cheers

Tony