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[guest]

What do you use a month (if you know)?

The reason I'm asking here is that I'm finally dragging myself into the 21st century mobile market

So I notice that for £15/month I can get a Sony Ericsson K660i with 300 minutes voice/texts from 3. Reasonable deal for a HSPDA phone I think bearing in mind that I can then (once I'm a customer) get the Broadband Max (7GB) product for £12.50/month as a special offer until the 31/5/08. That would be a total monthly bill of £27.50 which is only £2.50 more than Broadband Max costs on its own! I'd also get the USB adaptor for the laptop which I'd quite like.

However given the time constraints I don't have time to monitor my own personal browsing traffic before the offer expires

Now I know full well that I'd eat 7GB for breakfast on my landline connection but for anything large I would just VPN to the server at home and get that to download it via the UKO connection. So I think I could limit traffic on the mobile/laptop to web/mail/etc - bursty traffic rather than constant. Looking at the coverage map for 3 I should get decent speeds. TBH I'm not expecting that much from HSPDA (mobile broadband) anyway.

So what do you all think you use on your home broadband connections and do you think 7GB is enough for a months mobile (laptop really) browsing?

Help please

[roseway]

I average about 10 GB a month, and that includes about 3 GB of Linux ISOs and 1 GB of software upgrades and installations.

[guest]

How many hours a day Eric?

Or is the answer "too many" (like me)

[mr_chris]

> do you think 7GB is enough for a months mobile (laptop really) browsing?

Yes. Basically if you restrict downloads to essentials, you won't see anywhere near 7GB a month. I reckon without your downloads, you'll be very surprised at quite how little you will use just browsing.

The one caveat is (there's always one!) - you obviously need to keep things like streaming video - YouTube, iPlayer, etc... in the back of your mind, as if these are used wrecklessly, could soon eat up 7GB per month if they were streaming for several hours each day!

[oldfogy]

So what do you all think you use on your home broadband connections and do you think 7GB is enough for a months mobile (laptop really) browsing?

Just for browsing 7GB should be more than enough.
But you need to take into account any additional charges should you go over your monthly limit.
Also consider any cancellation fees and clauses should you decide later that it's not really for you.

VM Cable BB, average monthly use about 80-90GB for a 4Mb connection (soon to be upgraded to 10Mb at no extra charge) @ £25.00pm

Average browsing forums etc, 550MB per month (but very little streaming)

Warning - while you were reading a new reply has been posted. You may wish to review your post.

[roseway]

How many hours a day Eric?

Or is the answer "too many" (like me)

The answer is "too many". I would guess about 3-4 hours a day.

[guest]

£27.50/month is looking very tempting then

Actually if they doubled the usage allowance it'd start looking tempting for a main connection, especially if you've got a bit of a dodgy line but still live somewhere urban.

I'm wondering what the "gotcha" is as 3's price plan just for the K660i looks pretty good to me - and Skype, Messenger, Google Maps etc are all bundled into the base monthly cost even without an internet package add-on.

Perhaps I'm just too cynical

[guest]

I'm taking a punt on this deal. Mobile arrives on Saturday so I'll check out signal strength in various locations and then order the broadband package if all looks OK. I don't expect any problems if the coverage map is in any way honest or accurate

[roseway]

I'll be interested to hear how it goes.

[guest]

I'll report back then

[guest]

Phone has arrived and after a couple of calls the USB modem and BB service are ordered - modem should arrive Tuesday.

I decided not to wait as 3 allow you to use the BB service for 3 days and if the coverage isn't as good as you expected then you can return it FoC, which is quite decent.

The existing customers discount only works on the webpage after a couple of months of you being a customer so you have to call them.

So the deal is £15/month for a K660i with 300 minutes talk/texts, 300 free minutes to 3 numbers (which includes video calls I think), free Messenger Live (all traffic free), free Skype (all mobile<->Skype free) and probably a few other add-ons that I haven't noticed yet.

Then I added 7GB/month data to that for an additional £12.50 a month making a total of £27.50/month.

I reckon if you upped the data limits to 10GB and dropped the total cost to £25/month you would have a product which sold very well, even in the current chilly financial climate.

I'll report back on data speeds etc. I know there will be a proxy somewhere but I don't care as I'll just VPN right past it

[guest]

Just received the USB modem and SIM - all worked fine. The modem rather cleverly presents itself as a USB mass storage device initially which allows the device drivers/software for the modem to be stored in flash memory on the modem so there's no CD to lose

Quick checks of speeds around the house are 1000/300kbps but that doesn't really worry me as although the mast is within a mile or so, it is just over the horizon which makes for dodgy reception on mobiles (1 or 2 bars signal strength). Latency is about 120ms. I haven't worked out how to tell what the raw connection speed is yet so until I do then speeds quoted are measured speeds from sites like TBB.

I shall test it out on a drive about later on but I'm fairly happy so far. The only thing I'm a little irritated by is that it seems that the "mobile SIM" and the "modem SIM" aren't in any way linked, so if I want to use* the internet on the mobile then I need to either pay (again) or swap the SIMs. I don't think this is the way its meant to be so I'll call CS in a few days if the SIMs haven't been "linked" in some way by then.

I'll check that VPN works and also common ports to see if anything is being blocked. There is a proxy but rather than condemn it out of hand I'll test it first

*I can still use Messenger/Skype/Google Maps Location Services without swapping the SIM. The "mobile SIM" has no "general" internet allowance however. I was rather hoping that the allowances (voice/text/data) would apply to both SIMs but not so far

Edit :  I've just realised that the speeds listed above mean the connection is near enough identical to a fixed 1Mbps ADSL service. The reason its amusing is that I'm sure I was paying Zen more for that than I'm paying for a mobile/broadband package now

[roseway]

Swapping the SIMs wouldn't be a lot of fun, so I hope you get that sorted out. Apart from that it looks pretty good for mobile internet use.

[guest]

Well the SIM issue might not be that much of a problem. I can't see me doing much browsing from the mobile to be honest. It has a decent display but you simply can't ignore the fact that its small. For someone who likes mobiles (I don't) I'm sure it'd be fine but for anything other than ten minutes browsing here and there I can't see me using it.

VPN works fine although the signal around here varies enough that it can be a little jerky at times. I expect much better at a secondary location as it has a 3 mast less than 100 metres away and its clear line of sight too.

[guest]

OK this is what happened with the SIMs :

There are three broadband packages :

BB Lite (1GB); BB Plus (3GB) and BB Max (7GB)

The first two packages can be added to your mobile so there's no need for a new SIM or indeed a USB modem. The third package (BB Max) can't as its intended for "heavy" mobile users who generally already have "Internet Max" added to their mobile already. So for the first two packages you connect the phone to the laptop therefore no extra SIM required, but for the third you use a USB modem (hence new SIM).

Internet Max is essentially unlimited traffic (I'm sure there's a FUP somewhere  ) only to the mobile and connecting the mobile to a lappie is a breach of contract. I'm sure people do it all the same

Anyway the nice people at 3 gave me "Internet Max" free of charge (normally £5/month) for the duration of the contract when I explained my confusion

Edit - I really like Google Maps location services. Its genuinely useful which is a rarity these days.