mobile broadband (UK)

[Big G]

Tried the mrs' Vodaphone mobile broadband last night and it was painful. Browsing single sites at once is bearable, but I can't log into World of Warcraft due to lack of bandwidth and loading up 2 pages at once just grinds it all to a halt. It's 56k all over again.

Does anyone have an Orange dongle for mobile broadband since I have one coming this week to get me through the period of not having a phone line in my new house.

surely it's down to the area I'm using it, but so far 2 places 15 miles apart are very 56k on vodaphone

[DCM]

well, don't forget, you are on a very limited badnwidth, when it comes to mobile internet, and they can be miserably slow, to bareable, but these are not designed for gaming, more things like facebook and stuff.

[Big G]

they say it's 3.6mbit download with promises of going up to 7.2mbit soon.

are they just pulling our legs and really it's 56k or nothing?

[peetbee]

They probably have the words 'up to' in the blurb to cover them!

[Answer-RC-Pete]

Yeah - its variable to say the least - if you get a solid 3G signal its good for browing and emails (never tried gaming) but on a GPRS connection its painful just opening a email with attatchment..

I suspect its not unique to Voda though..

[MatJohnson]

Its contended bandwidth as well so the more people using it, the slower the connection.

[Titch]

Originally Posted by Big G

they say it's 3.6mbit download with promises of going up to 7.2mbit soon.

are they just pulling our legs and really it's 56k or nothing?

Bit's are not to be confused with Bytes.. Bit's are much smaller.. 8x smaller infact. there are 8 bits in 1 byte - so that impressive sounding 3.6 mbits is not even half a megabyte. So yes, it is about 45 to 56 k - aka dial up

[jimmy]

I can get about 300kb a second with my three dongle - loads faster than dialup. I downloaded a few tv proggies on it yesterday.

[Big G]

Originally Posted by Titch

Bit's are not to be confused with Bytes.. Bit's are much smaller.. 8x smaller infact. there are 8 bits in 1 byte - so that impressive sounding 3.6 mbits is not even half a megabyte. So yes, it is about 45 to 56 k - aka dial up

aren't you getting confused now?

56k was 8 kbytes (although in practice I never saw more than 4k back in the day)

I see 100k downloads on my orange dongle when I do download stuff, but with my 500mb limit I try and avoid that.

3.6mbit is pretty good considering we all had 512kbit ASDL lines at the start of the broadband journey. The upstream is a little poop though.

[Titch]

Originally Posted by Big G

aren't you getting confused now?

Got my Kilobytes and Kilobits mixed up..