text: I have been playing with a 3G data modem, and I am completely converted. It’s often at least as fast as most communal wifi, and a great deal cheaper and more secure. I hate juggling with the the firewall every time I connect to a new access point. The coverage is patchy; inside Liverpool Street station, I could only get dialup speeds and sometimes on the train the connection would drop entirely. But the station always used to be a black spot for ordinary cellphone reception, too, and for much of the journey I was getting perfectly acceptable speeds. One of the _Guardian’s_ leader writers taught me a useful trick for getting net access in strange offices — just pull the network cable out of the nearest machine and plug it into your laptop — but this does seem a very much tidier solution. What’s even nicer is that it is pay as you go. If I am not going into London, I need pay nothing that month. The only small sadness is that it may be network locked. The salesperson would not give me a straight answer about that, and I don’t know who 3’s network partners are abroad, from whom I would buy a payg data card.
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  1 Response to Brief techie note
  Jonathan Lundell says:
  April 17, 2008 at 6:05 pm
  T-Mobile in the UK, so maybe that covers a lot of other geography?
  This technology has been a godsend for me. I switched my home net access from ISDN to EVDO (US Sprint network) and got 8x the bandwidth at half the cost. (I live in the relative boonies of Sili Valley: no DSL, no cable, but a nice view of the Pacific).