I am trying out my new pay as you go O2 Mobile Broadband USB stick. After a few teething troubles (it turns out that a double blink of a green LED means there is no signal, and the steel framed building my flat is in is not good for mobile phone signals) it seems to work very well. On the train it is much better at coping with varying coverage than my T-Mobile G1 phone is. The phone seems to take a very long time to re-establish a connection when it is lost; the 3G modem is quick at this and happily switches between 3G, EDGE and GPRS without too much complaining.
I chose the O2 PAYG one because it has weekly and daily top-up options. I’m likely to be using it very irregularly. £2 for 500MB for a day seems fair enough when I want to check my mail while away, although it really is ridiculously expensive when you think about it, it’s better than paying £15 a month when months might go by without me using it at all.
Now it is time to get off the train. More later, perhaps.
Update: The USB modem only cost £20 and is a Huawei E160. It can do HSDPA but not the fastest 7.2Mbps speeds. But it seems fast enough. There doesn’t seem to be anything special abot these modems: they work on Macs and Linux without special software so there may be alternatives to the O2 Connection Manager software for Windows. And presumably netbooks that have integrated 3G and a SIM card slot can be made to work easily.
I have a deal with Three where they give me 1Gb a month for which they charge me £5. This is a “loyalty” deal that they probably wouldn’t give to a new customer though. They are presently advertising £7.50 a month for new customers for the same deal, which still isn’t bad though. They also offered me 5Gb for £7.50 last time I upgraded, (The one thing you need to be careful about is their excess charges for going over the allowance, though. They hit you for 10p a megabyte over the limit – ie 20 times what I am paying for data under the limit. They will put a cap on it so that it just stops working if you hit the limit if you ask them to though).
I have used a variety of 3G modems: the Huawei E220, E156G, the ZTE MF627 and the Huawei E5830 MiFi. All of these either support 7.2Mbps out of the box or can be upgraded to supporting it with a firmware upgrade. It’s funny that the E160 cannot be upgraded this way, although it appears that this is the case.