After spending many boring lunch breaks at work with no access to the Internet i decided it was about time i purchased a 3G modem for my laptop.
My provider of choice is T-Mobile as i already have an existing contract with them and have had no real problems in the few years i have been a customer of theirs.
When i visited the T-Mobile website to make an order for a 3G USB modem i was presented with various different plans and contract periods.
As i am a heavy Internet user i opted for the Web ‘N’ Walk Max plan as this has a fair usage policy of 10 gigabytes a month and allows access to VoIP and streaming services. This all comes for the fair price of £35 monthly for the max plan with nothing to pay for the modem its self if you take out a 24 month contract.
Once i had completed the order online via the secure checkout i was instantly sent an email indicating my order was being processed and the appropriate credit checks were being conducted.
A few hours later into the day i then received a second email advising me that i had passed the screening stage and my order was now being picked from the warehouse for same day dispatch.
As expected the next morning my order had arrived via Royal Mail Special Delivery. I opened the rather small package to be greeted by the modem it’s self, the two USB cables and the manual. As usual i put the manual to one side, connected up the USB cable to the modem and then plugged this into my laptop.
Upon plugging the modem into my laptop Windows Vista automatically recognised the device and displayed an auto-run window to install the modem dashboard and drivers from the on-board flash memory of the modem it’s self. I proceeded with the install which took a little less than one minute to complete.
Now the modem was installed it was time to connect to the Internet for the first time and experience 3G / HSDPA browsing on my laptop.
The T-Mobile dashboard software indicated i had a HSDPA signal with a strength of two bars. I now proceeded to click connect to authenticate the device with the T-Mobile servers.
After a short moment the device was now online and i was able to browse the Internet via the Web ‘N’ Walk service.
My first use of the service was to conduct a simple speed test. The site i used for the speed test was Speedtest.net which reported i had just a little over 400kbps downstream bandwidth and approximately 300kbps upstream bandwidth.
I have to say i was rather shocked at the speeds report by Speedtest.net as T-Mobile advertise the service as having a maximum throughput of 7.2 mbps.
After a little thinking and a spot of lunch i decided to try and test the service in another way by using a multi-threaded download manager, my choice of download manager was FlashGet. The item i decided to download was the DVD ISO of CentOS 5.
FlashGet reported my average speed to be 225 KB/s which calculates to be approx 1.8 mbps. I was quite surprised at the new reported speed as just over a year ago even my home broadband supplied by Pipex was not as quick as the Web ‘N’ Walk service.
Overall i think the Web ‘N’ Walk service supplied by T-Mobile is useful as it enables road warriors to access the Internet anywhere they have got mobile phone coverage. However i think the fair usage policy that T-Mobile enforce could be a little fairer towards the end user, for example the 10 gigabyte limit on the Max plan would be quite easy to consume within a week.
I also think that the pricing could be a lot cheaper as well, compared to the Max plan sold by Three which has a fair usage limit of 7GB a month, T-Mobile works out to be £10 a month more expensive for an extra three gigabytes of transfer.
Tags: 3g hsdpa tmobile three mobile broadband fast 7.2 web an
I totally agree with you. I use the web ‘n’ walk plus, with the 3-gig transfer cap – and today recieved the warning letter telling me I had exceeded my limit by 1.55 gig! Best part is – I live in an area where the signal fluctuates from 3G to HSDPA frequently, and the lesser speed means it takes forever to open a webpage, let alone download a copy of Father Ted (+/- 200Mb).
Sometimes there is no connection at all!
Even on HSDPA sometimes you can experience some serious connectivity issues i have tried using a vpn over this to try and make things more stable but this ends up killing the vpn server for some reason or another.
i signed up two weeks ago and have already gone 3 gb over my 3 gb usage i wanted to cancel but im stuck with a contract i did not get told about the fair usage policy when i joined via car phone warehouse i only got told they were unlimited download limit
Have they charged you much for going over the 3gb? Some companies never do mention the data allowance and yet they sting you for it. Always best to read the small print several times.
Let us know how it goes chap
)
t mobile told me there the only company that don’t charge for going over but they can slow your connection down, i haven’t been with them for a month yet but if someone know how they react to excessive use it would be useful
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
I too have just received a letter from T-Mobile telling me that I have exceeded my “Unlimited” web usage limit!
Dictionary
unlimited |ʌnˌlɪmɪtɪd|
adjective
not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent : the range of possible adaptations was unlimited.
• Brit. (of a company) not limited.
• Mathematics (of a problem) having an infinite number of solutions.
DERIVATIVES
unlimitedly adverb
unlimitedness noun
Thesaurus
unlimited
adjective
1 unlimited supplies of water inexhaustible, limitless, illimitable, boundless, immeasurable, incalculable, untold, infinite, endless, bottomless, never-ending. antonym finite.
2 unlimited travel unrestricted, unconstrained, unrestrained, unchecked, unbridled, uncurbed. antonym restricted.
3 unlimited power total, unqualified, unconditional, unrestricted, absolute, supreme. antonym conditional, restricted.
Phoned them up and pointed out the obvious oxymoron and forced one of their operators to admit that their advertising was misleading.
They are now telling me that if I continue to abuse their “Fair Usage Policy” i.e. 3GB (a limit in my opinion) I face having my connection speed reduced to that of a dial-up connection! Of which I still have to pay the said twenty nine or so pounds a month (the whole experience was a bit like being told off by your RE teacher)
Apparently, if this happens (and they give you two warnings!) If you behave on the dial-up speed, they will restore you to full flow.
So why the f*** do I still have to pay the extortionate amount of twenty nine pounds something for a connection the equivalent of an old dial-up until I’ve supposedly been punished?
Steve you are correct in that tmobile are behaving like school teachers. I think their advertising of “unlimited” is a joke as this would indicate you could view an unlimited ammount of webpages which im sure eventually could ammount to 3gb and use your monthly allowance in one go.
I think ofcom should do something about ISP’s that advertise a so called “unlimited” service.
I agree, apparently their all at it. I’ve spoken to a few people about it and it seems that originally they thought 3GB would be enough to justify the use of a so-called “Unlimited” web browsing experience and when they realized that the overall majority of users where substantially going over 3GB’s they introduced the “Fair Usage Policy”.
It seems to me that when the going gets tough they just make up new terminology to screw the consumers over.
It’s a bit like going in to a restaurant that advertises “All You Can Eat” and then having a waiter looking over your shoulder as you dine.
And to Matty on July 17th, 2008,
If I were you I’d avoid Car phone Warehouse like the plague in future, because of their baffling use of terminology they conned me into running two consecutive mobile contracts at the same time. I couldn’t get out o it for three months! but that’s another story.
haha all of this is not sounding good to me!!! =( ive just got myself a t-mobile web n walk with 3gbs from carphone warehouse today….. and it seems this is what i have to look 4ward to!! =( ohh i wish i looked this stuff up b4 i signed the 24month contract!! not good!!
I have not had any problems with t-mobile so far i even roamed in Croatia at one point using data over 3g on my Nokia N73.
I was running an application called fring which lets you make calls to people on msn over the net and i did not seem to get charged for the data