Does anyone have any experince with Mobile Dongles?

[unadkat]

Hi

Does anyone have any experience with mobile dongles in other-words is like the phone receptions, i.e if you don't get a signal in certain area's you wont be able surf etc.

I look forward to hearing your feedback

[reddiesel]

Originally Posted by unadkat

Hi

Does anyone have any experience with mobile dongles in other-words is like the phone receptions, i.e if you don't get a signal in certain area's you wont be able surf etc.

I look forward to hearing your feedback

Yes thats right, if your using one in a basement flat for instance you wont get a signal unless you have a window and can position in the right place.

[TheCoder]

They are also very prone to dropping the signal at random intervals, usually whilst your doing something critical.

Speed is generally relatively slow (rarely above a sustained 1Mbps, even on a 7.2Mbps connection, for more than a few minutes) and you get fairly nassty 'ping' times of anything upto a few seconds (normally 50mS or less for a decent broadband) making online gaming almost impossible.

Mobile is ok as a backup or where there's no choice or maybe you only need limited internet access (email, limited browsing etc) but for i'd tend to avoid for a main connection if possible.

[unadkat]

Originally Posted by TheCoder

They are also very prone to dropping the signal at random intervals, usually whilst your doing something critical.

Speed is generally relatively slow (rarely above a sustained 1Mbps, even on a 7.2Mbps connection, for more than a few minutes) and you get fairly nassty 'ping' times of anything upto a few seconds (normally 50mS or less for a decent broadband) making online gaming almost impossible.

Mobile is ok as a backup or where there's no choice or maybe you only need limited internet access (email, limited browsing etc) but for i'd tend to avoid for a main connection if possible.

It is actually for a friend of mine and getting a ADSL line is far to expensive.

he / she just wants it for the purpose of surfing the internet,maybe use you-tube at times and obviously checking emails.

but for i'd tend to avoid for a main connection if possible.

Sorry but am not sure what you meant by this

[reddiesel]

It will be fine for that sort of use, might be glitchy streaming from you tube, They are not much good for heavy downloading like films etc.

[TheCoder]

Originally Posted by unadkat

Sorry but am not sure what you meant by this

I meant that mobile dongles are not the best solution for your primary form of internet connection unless you only want very occasional browsing and email. If you want to stream video etc then you'll likely have very mixed results. ADSL is usually a better option for anything more than basic usage.

[Matt34]

I used to use one quite a bit whilst travelling round the country. You need a good 3G signal for them to work and even then it's very slow for surfing the net. I also got a cheap 5m USB cable so I could position the dongle for best reception. Hope this helps.

Matt

[jack08]

i use my iphone for internet turn on hotspot on my iphone4 then go on my laptop look for my iphone wireless it shows up in list did speedtest got from 4 to 6 meg and 2mb up not bad unlimted to

[waqasahmed]

Originally Posted by unadkat

It is actually for a friend of mine and getting a ADSL line is far to expensive.

It may be expensive at first, but once your contract is up, it gets much cheaper.The cheapest currently is Tesco online:

http://phone-shop.tesco.com/convpro/...broadband.html

and that should cost you £15.75 in total. We were lucky and had our O2 contract finish around the time of this offer (Finishing soon) and we get "up to" 20Mb broadband with a standalone line (no free evening and weekend calls, but really we don't use the landline)

We now pay £16.25 to O2 for line rental + broadband (I've dealt with O2 and many other companies before and I do think their CS is the best in the industry, so for the extra 50p, it's not bad)

We're also doubly lucky that we get 17.5Mb/s on average on our line at home, but where Im at now, the average speed is around 4Mb/s on ADSL, so we're all chipping in for cable, for an average speed of around 92.84Mb/s

Originally Posted by jack08

i use my iphone for internet turn on hotspot on my iphone4 then go on my laptop look for my iphone wireless it shows up in list did speedtest got from 4 to 6 meg and 2mb up not bad unlimted to

This. It's probably cheaper this way as well - well minus the iphone, but you can get some cheap android phone and tether using that. Note: it won't be cheaper than ADSL for what you're getting but cheaper than a dongle

[waqasahmed]

Originally Posted by jack08

i use my iphone for internet turn on hotspot on my iphone4 then go on my laptop look for my iphone wireless it shows up in list did speedtest got from 4 to 6 meg and 2mb up not bad unlimted to

That'd also depend on where you are in the country. I live right near a mast here and get terrible speeds - it might be because of the way the houses are laid out

Back home, I got pretty good speeds. I haven't done a speed test, but the difference is noticeable