I bought the Voda dongle - it works fine. There is a requirement to use
it periodically (I think once every 120 days). My main requirement is
to collect e-mails and do very basic web searches, look at train times,
stuff like that, on the few days I am away from home. E-mail collection
is very cheap - the balance goes down by about 10p every time I use it.
I still have over £14 left so GOK how Vodafone will make much money out
of me. I guess if my home office broadband goes down I will use it as a
backup, again mainly for e-mail so might spend a bit then.

I collect from a number of POP 3 addresses using Thunderbird,and an
associate company's Outlook web mail system. It connects via 3G when it
can and GPRS when it can't. Speed has not been an issue - but I am not
trying to download large files apart from the odd excel spreadsheet, and
am quite happy to sip my coffee whilst it gets on with things.

They are so cheap now - less than half a tank of petrol - and if I
travelled a lot I would be tempted to have 2 or 3 from different
networks and use whichever is best on the day. With some hotels
charging £15 a night for wireless access in London, it's a no brainer.
Beats having to eat in Macdonalds for their free wifi too.

It has a Micro SD card slot, so can use it as a memory stick as well.
One less thing to carry.

I am a very happy customer.




In message <78s5amF1n0lo9U1@mid.individual.net>, Roger Mills
<watt.tyler@googlemail.com> writes
>In an earlier contribution to this discussion,
>Jim Kewley <JKewley@noanswer.com> wrote:
>
>> Dunno how many here are internet nerds, like me. In my attempts to
>> maintain a web connection on our travels with the van, I bought a 3
>> mobile PAYG dongle internet connection thingy. Big mistake.
>>
>> 3 mobile appears to offer the cheapest way of getting on the web
>> whilst travelling, consequently I bought one of their dongles. Sadly
>> 3 mobile merely serves to emphasise the truth of ' you get what you
>> pay for '. Despite the apparent value in it's bandwidth offering the
>> truth is most of the time the connection is so slow and unreliable,
>> with frequent dropped lines, that anybody would be hard pressed to
>> take advantage of the bandwidth available.
>>
>> Finally, after my umpteenth dropped/slow connection, I gave up with 3
>> and decided to try an O2 version of a similar PAYG dongle set up. O2
>> is slightly more expensive than 3 but so far I've found it's
>> connections to be consistently far better and so much more reliable
>> than 3 mobile.
>> Sent from the Caravan Club, Wirral Country Park site, via my O2 PAYG
>> connection. O2 is retaining a steady 3G connection at 3.6 gigs,
>> checking the 3 mobile dongle it seems to be struggling to find a GPRS
>> connection at 56 mbs.
>>
>> HTH for anybody interested.
>
>I too bought a '3' dongle, and have been very disappointed with its
>performance. I don't think I've *ever* achieved download speeds in excess of
>1Mbps, and it's often not much better than dial-up speeds. In a recent
>caravan trip to the New Forest I couldn't make the bl**dy thing work at at,
>despite having had some sort of connection on the same site a few weeks
>earlier - and despite hoisting the dongle high up outside the caravan on the
>end of a USB extension lead.
>
>The version I bought came bundled with 12G of usage - which expires after 12
>months - and further top ups cost £10 for 1G or 1 month - whichever occurs
>first. [There's no way I'm going to use 12G in 12 months because my use is
>only occasional, when away from home - but it was a reasonably good deal at
>the time].
>
>One of the problems with the '3' setup (apart from it not working!) is that
>it's time limited. So, for example, if you want to use it on a short caravan
>trip, you have to buy a month's worth, and if you go on another trip (say) 6
>weeks later, you have to buy another month's worth even if you've only used
>a fraction of the previous month's bandwidth.
>
>I see that Vodaphone are now offering a PAYG BB dongle for £39 - including a
>bundled 1G of usage. AIUI - unlike the equivalent '3' offereng - this
>doesn't time out, so you don't have to top it up until you actually run out
>of bandwidth. Top-ups appear to cost £15 per 1G (as opposed to 3's £10) but,
>if they don't expire after one month, may represent better value for
>occasional users.
>
>When my year's worth of '3' expires, I shall be very tempted to ditch '3'
>and try Vodaphone instead - particularly if user reports in the meantime are
>favourable.
>
>Anyone got any experience of Vodaphone mobile broadband?
>
>[I'm cross-posting this to uk.telecom.broadband and uk.telecom.mobile
>because I think it's of wider interest than just the caravanning fraternity]

--
Richard C