BLUE SKY THINKER

REVIEW

Before you say, "oh, another one of those", take a look at the speed and price on page 3.

BLUE SKY THINKER

Having just spent my first 24 hours with one of these I can honestly say the glowing review is fully justified; and that's before the 1st August switch to 1.8Mbit/sec (let alone 7.2 next year!).

IO540

The problem is coverage, which ranges from poor to zero. A few months ago I did a bit of testing with a 3G PCMCIA card and most of the time it was falling back to GPRS.

I'd give it another few years.

In the meantime, it's easier to get a PDA with Netstumbler (an old Ipaq 5550 works well) and drive down the road and count the unsecured access points; then park at one with a good parking spot. 5 minutes later and you are sorted with full ADSL speed, and it's free

BLUE SKY THINKER

This card has got WLAN, GPRS and UMTS and scuttles around all three supposedly looking for the best signal.

However, they are configurable on different profiles and I have disabled WLAN (already on laptop) and GPRS. ...Sitting at home between the hills in the North Downs solely on UTMS I'm getting the 'advertised' rate (pre 1st August) of x6-7 dial-up speed, not far short of standard (x10 broadband). ...This would seem to bode well, post 1st August.

IO540

Yes, 3G is truly impressive - when you get a signal.

And when the employer is paying for the contract

The problem with "roaming" WLAN is that it is getting harder to find. I don't exactly live in hotels but have stayed at a few, and I reckon that people in cities are getting wise to it. I have failed to get free wifi in every hotel in the past 2-3 years - except where it is provided as a courtesy, and most hotels have done a deal with say T-Mobile and you have to pay.

In most cities, it isn't as easy as it used to be to just sit outside a cafe, pretending to be working on one's laptop. To get that, one has to move about a bit more, and it looks a bit obvious.

drauk

I think 3G coverage has perhaps improved over the last year or so. I do mostly use it in London where I always get 3G and at least the fallback to GPRS is completely transparent (it can happen mid "call" without problems). Elsewhere it is variable, but it's worked in all the cities I've tried.

Web n' Walk is cheap at 20 quid a month but disallows use of VoIP and any kind of instant messenger. Mind you, with an SSH tunnel...

Saab Dastard

My recent experience with 3G is exactly that. Moving around within the same room can cause the signal to drop. It is still flakey even where there "should" be coverage.

SD

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You can't have everything - where would you put it?

airborne_artist

I'd suggest that UMTS/3G is always going to be flaky, even when compared to GSM (especially GSM 900). The signal attenuation over distance will always be an issue, and when you then combine that with steel/breeze blocks in structures, you'll find that it will be impossible to get 100% certainty of signal in urban areas.

The telcos are looking at in-building pico-cells, but my guess is that wifi might degrade the business model to such an extent that they give up trying to get decent signals further than the street.

Note to non-anoraks - radio signal weaken (attenuate) with the square of the frequency, so double the freq. and you quarter the rec'd signal at the same point from the Tx'r. UMTS is at 2100Mhz in the UK, and orig. GSM at 900 Mhz.

drauk

That's not what I've found. I've had 3G for about 9 months now and use it on close to a daily basis - in my experience it has been very reliable.

BLUE SKY THINKER