My curiosity piqued by the aggressive advertising for 'wireless broadband on the
move' offerings, I thought it might be a
worthwhile experiment to test one of the current solutions for peripatetic
surfers.
I took Vodafone's new 019 mobile broadband USB stick on a road trip and surfed for all I was worth. The press release promises up to 7.2Mbps downstream and 1.44Mbps upstream connections. Those speeds are respectively fourteen and twenty-two times faster than the original 3G service launched all those years ago in 2004.
Precise speeds rarely reached those levels, but the performance certainly compared favourably with the 512mbps connection that seemed good enough for us all just a few years ago. Passing through some cells caused the performance to degrade noticeably, but I never managed to make it die, despite downloading a song from iTunes while driving down the motorway at 50mph, and taking a look at Google Maps while I was ankle deep in the North Sea.
Installation was entirely painless on either Mac or PC, with a dual-format CD configuring the 'dial up' connection entirely automatically. Even in the age of mobile phones and wireless networks there's still something extraordinary about being connected to the web while you're in a rowing boat.
If you're paying more than ??15 a month for your current broadband service - maybe because you never got round to changing suppliers during the 2006 Broadband Price War - and you're a casual surfer rather than a multimedia addict, Vodafone's solution may be a much more practical solution than it might at first appear.