I am using T Mobile for my mobile internet, on contract for 12 months,
£15/month and no limit, though there is a fair use policy of 3g, never been
anywhere near that though. Coverage is great and speeds are very good, would
recommend them. I now believe that they are doing a deal with a phone so you
can use the phone as a modem and use the data minutes from that contract.

Neil


"Roger Mills" wrote in message
...
In an earlier contribution to this discussion,
Jim Kewley wrote:

Dunno how many here are internet nerds, like me. In my attempts to
maintain a web connection on our travels with the van, I bought a 3
mobile PAYG dongle internet connection thingy. Big mistake.

3 mobile appears to offer the cheapest way of getting on the web
whilst travelling, consequently I bought one of their dongles. Sadly
3 mobile merely serves to emphasise the truth of ' you get what you
pay for '. Despite the apparent value in it's bandwidth offering the
truth is most of the time the connection is so slow and unreliable,
with frequent dropped lines, that anybody would be hard pressed to
take advantage of the bandwidth available.

Finally, after my umpteenth dropped/slow connection, I gave up with 3
and decided to try an O2 version of a similar PAYG dongle set up. O2
is slightly more expensive than 3 but so far I've found it's
connections to be consistently far better and so much more reliable
than 3 mobile.
Sent from the Caravan Club, Wirral Country Park site, via my O2 PAYG
connection. O2 is retaining a steady 3G connection at 3.6 gigs,
checking the 3 mobile dongle it seems to be struggling to find a GPRS
connection at 56 mbs.

HTH for anybody interested.

I too bought a '3' dongle, and have been very disappointed with its
performance. I don't think I've *ever* achieved download speeds in excess
of 1Mbps, and it's often not much better than dial-up speeds. In a recent
caravan trip to the New Forest I couldn't make the bl**dy thing work at
at, despite having had some sort of connection on the same site a few
weeks earlier - and despite hoisting the dongle high up outside the
caravan on the end of a USB extension lead.

The version I bought came bundled with 12G of usage - which expires after
12 months - and further top ups cost £10 for 1G or 1 month - whichever
occurs first. [There's no way I'm going to use 12G in 12 months because my
use is only occasional, when away from home - but it was a reasonably good
deal at the time].

One of the problems with the '3' setup (apart from it not working!) is
that it's time limited. So, for example, if you want to use it on a short
caravan trip, you have to buy a month's worth, and if you go on another
trip (say) 6 weeks later, you have to buy another month's worth even if
you've only used a fraction of the previous month's bandwidth.

I see that Vodaphone are now offering a PAYG BB dongle for £39 - including
a bundled 1G of usage. AIUI - unlike the equivalent '3' offereng - this
doesn't time out, so you don't have to top it up until you actually run
out of bandwidth. Top-ups appear to cost £15 per 1G (as opposed to 3's
£10) but, if they don't expire after one month, may represent better value
for occasional users.

When my year's worth of '3' expires, I shall be very tempted to ditch '3'
and try Vodaphone instead - particularly if user reports in the meantime
are favourable.

Anyone got any experience of Vodaphone mobile broadband?

[I'm cross-posting this to uk.telecom.broadband and uk.telecom.mobile
because I think it's of wider interest than just the caravanning
fraternity]
--
Cheers,
Roger
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