Wednesday 24 February 2010

3G Mobile Broadband Experiences

Being temporally hospitalized I've had the chance to see how it is to run an internet company entirely via my Laptop and Mobile Broadband. My bother gifted me with a T-mobile USB Stick, and that was enough to get me a Windows connections. Once I upgraded my Linux to Ubuntu 9.10 Jaunty Jackalope, the USB stick give me mobile broadband straight away, with the configuration tools in the menu. Of course it didn't run fine. Every-time I left the Internet alone for more than 5 minutes, the connection would drop and wouldn't come back, until I rebooted. Linux and Windows both behaved like that so it must be a problem with the USB stick.

T-Mobile came which a download policy that blocks out all adult material, and somehow classes Blogspot and You-tube as adult. The on-line prove you age by credit card page, didn't understand my USB sticks phone number, but a quick phone call to there support center, got me registered, and the content block removed. So far so fine. Of course my Vista partition decided to lose its System Event Notification Services, (somewhere near svchost.exe), and my Linux doesn't like my SiS onboard graphic card, several afternoons, editing xorg.conf, didn't fix it, so i'm working and browsing at 800 by 600 on Linux, and not at all on Windows. None of those problems are T-mobiles, it just part of the hassle of having a laptop.

T-Mobile has a 2GB per month, mobile broad band limit. Now some of you light
weight users, might think that enough. We all know that shared movies and porn downloads will fill that quick, but I wasn't trying any of those. In fact one download of a Windows Vista services pack, and a few Linux Updates, was enough to push me over that limit. Once over that limit you can't download anything between the pick hours of 4pm to midnight. But you can still browser the Internet. Topping up the broadband, can be done via a matching card, or over the phone and Internet, you'll probably find it expense and possibly even outside you budget. But when you stuck in Hospital, there really isn't a better way.

I'd say the mobile broadband with a laptop, reminds me a lot of my old modem days, you know its going to get good soon, but at the moment it full of snacks and traps. Roll on the next generation of mobile broadband. And Some Linux guru please fix up SiS 671 support, in Ubuntu. SiS may be a forgotten player in graphics land, but its still built in to many old laptops. Ubuntu even has xserver-xorg-video-sis in it, so it might just be my models that's missing.
To summaries mobile board band works we'll enough, if only the stick would correctly redial without losing dhcp or whatever, and have a large bandwidth limit, i'd be very happy with it.

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