Three mobile broadband is a great idea, in theory, as you can plug in the toggle and away you go. ADSL like broadband on the go and access wherever you want. So you can take all your online life with you. But how is it in practice.
Installing the Three mobile dongle, a Huawei E220 seemed to be an easy thing. Looking at the three website they had a Mac specific instruction manual and a driver to down load as the dongle does not contain Mac drivers as it does contain windows drivers. A minor set back I thought. So I download the driver and get the set up guide ready. Installing the driver goes well, but then the guide suggests that I change the APN number with the driver application… but where is it. It is not on the three website ad there is no mention of it in the questions and answers. Has Three made a mess up? Well only a small one, but thankfully where there is a technical problem there is a geek who has posted a solution in a forum. You need to download this file, it is not hosted in any official capacity, so please feel free to down load it from here to get your Mac working with three mobile broadband. (lhuaweidatacardapp) You then add the APN, three.co.uk and away you go.
Once connected I went to Speedtest.net, I manage to get a download of 1mb and upload of 100k. Not bd in my view for being in a built up area in London. The ping as high but in everyday usage it works. Pages are not as quick as appearing as on my home broadband connection, but that is 24mb from Bethere (see my review.)
So, it works while in London in my flat, but what about a road test. I am currently on a train speeding through the wonderful countryside of the west country in the UK. As soon as I got on the train at Paddington, I got the laptop out and fired up the device. It connected first time, registering 3.6mb, surfed a few pages, facebook being one (my profile is LINK if you want to add me.) and it worked well. It is a wonderful technology that allows my Mac to connect to the Internet from a high-speed train. Although, once we hit open country where I could hear the white noise of people saying, ‘hello, hello can you hear me?’ I realised my magical mystery tour of mobile broadband was about to turn into a wet British summer. The connection ground to a halt. I do not blame three for this, covering mile after mile of field is not a priority as cows and sheep simply don’t do mobiles. But I would like to see a greater commitment to developing a technology that provided a mobile service to long haul train routes. So I am writing this blog into a word file at the moment but do plan on posting it via three mobile broadband shortly.
The data plan is also very good, I have opted for a pay as you go option. For £15 I get 3gb of data to use over 30 days. I think this is very reasonable when there is no contract; the other options are 1gb for £10 and 7GB for £25.
One of the other reasons I brought three mobile broadband is you can use it abroad on three mobile networks for no extra cost. You can also look on that particular countries website and see if it they have signal in your area, even down to if they have signal in the accommodation you are planning to stay in. That is simply brilliant!
I am very happy with three mobile broadband, and once you have gotten around the comparative minor technical hitch at setting up it is a really useful and dependable service.
I have also contacted three and asked them to put the setup program on their website along with the driver for the Huawei E220.
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