There is a lot of noise at the moment about netbooks and netbooks with built in 3G. A lot of mobile phone providers are giving away netbooks with bundles of mobile phones or mobile internet USB dongles It’s all looking good and things are moving ahead quite fast at the moment in the world of mobile internet.
The problem I am finding is the misuse of advertising in terms of data speeds from the different UK providers. They all mention a combination of GPRS, EDGE 2G, 3G, 3G+, UMTS, HSDPA it can be really confusing when some are stating 7.2mbps! and it’s quite literally down to the network provider you decide to sign up with and the signal coverage in your area.
Here are some overall real world data stats:
- 2.5G (GPRS) – 114 Kbps
- 2.75G (EDGE) – 230 Kbps
- 3G (UMTS) – 384 Kbps
- 3.5G (HSDPA) -
- Vodafone : 1.2Mbs
- T-Mobile : 993Kb
- O2 : 812Kb
- Three : 764Kb
- Orange : 683Kb
Personally In my caravanning mobile travels I use a Sony Vaio 14inch screen laptop (41.6cm x 30cm x 3.4cm and only 3.8 kg) with a 2 year old Sierra Wireless Aircard 850 EDGE, HSDPA,PCMCIA data card from Orange.The card sits in the laptop un-noticed, unlike the USB dongles and in a weak signal area there is an external antenna that can be placed out of the window.
The speeds I have experienced are 400kbps at home in a 3G area and 200kbps in Devon on EDGE. I have also tested the HTC Touch non-3G mobile phone on a USB lead in the middle of Derby and achieved 150kbps.
But here’s a thought, If you have a data card or mobile phone that is capable of switching between EDGE and 3G, you may find that in a congested 3G area (like London) you could switch to EDGE and get better bandwidth as you will not be sharing with so many users.
Another thing you really need to keep your eye on in the advertising is a kilobit per second and a kilobyte per second … there are 8 bits in one byte so if you download at 30KBps it is actually 240Kbps (just look out for the capital B for a bit or Byte)
PS. run MSCONFIG to turn off all the data hogging applications such as Windows update and anti-virus when going mobile. Oh and did I mention I get all this under the £1 ‘browse for a day’ bundle 
… shhhh
… shhhh
About Richard Mackney