Vodafone Mobile Connect Card

[BEagle]

Does anyone have any experience of this device? It seems to be too good to be true for laptop users - tri-band GPRS connectivity world-wide all from a little PCMCIA card plugged into the normal card slot. It costs around £150 and the cheapest monthly charge is £5 plus £2 per MB of data actually sent - so does it really mean no more messing about with wires, buying expensive software, changing dial-up settings every time you go overseas and then only being able to connect at 9.6Kbps.....

[flyingwysiwyg]

so does it really mean no more messing about with wires, buying expensive software, changing dial-up settings every time you go overseas and then only being able to connect at 9.6Kbps.....

As I understand it.............Yes

Basically its just a mobile phone built in to a PCMCIA card on as seperate phone number / account.

Alternatively just get a bluetooth phone when you next upgrade and a USB Bluetooth adaptor (around £ 50.00) and use your existing mobile account. Usage costs are about the same and the Bluetooth bit works fine for me.

FWyg

[BEagle]

Great - I've now ordered one. I shouldn't have bothered to go through my local phone store as they're quoting 2 weeks' delivery! I could have bought one today - and cheaper by over GBP 20 - at LHR T2......

[BEagle]

Well - it finally arrived on Wednesday and I took it home to set it up. That should have been a straightforward process except that the dealer didn't know that he should have supplied a dedicated SIM card for the VMC card! Back to the shop, SIM card fitted and the software intallation was pretty easy. But then I could only send/receive SMS - so after a few tortuous phonecalls to Vodafone I elicited that the SIM card should have been GPRS-enabled, but hadn't been. That can take up to 48 hours - so another shout at Vodafone and all was finally well.....

So does it work? Yes, very well. Even with just 1-2 bars of signal strength it connected at 57.6 Kbps; that's better than the 45-46Kbps I get on my land line!

Only minor points: 1. The laptop speakers pick up a bit of the mobile phone buzz during data exchange and 2. The 'Vodafone dashboard' only fills 80% of the screen with 1024x768 pixels correctly set.

But this promises to be an excellent toy - no more faffing about with wires plugged into the mobile phone and then trying to find a data-supporting network with at best 9.6 Kbps connectivity.

[BEagle]

I've had yet more hassle with it - and more long fruitless phonecalls to Vodafone. Basically I can receive e-mails and access the web OK - but I can't send any e-mails. Vodafone say "It is an issue" which I understand to mean that they know there's a problem. Every time I try to send an e-mail using OE6 and Virgin.net when connected with the VMC card, I just get:

"The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was (anything I try to use). Subject '(Whatever)', Account: 'mail.virgin.net', Server: 'mail.virgin.net', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '550 relaying mail to (the ISP I was trying to use) is not allowed', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 550, Error Number: 0x800CCC79"

Not happy. It is not fit for its intended purpose and Vodafone's attitude is extremely unhelpful

[BEagle]

Finally found someone prepared to listen at Vodafone.....

It seems the problem is with the default e-mail outgoing mail server. Not all normal ISP servers will accept the Vodafone data stream, so in OE6 one must create a second account with server.vodafone.net as the outgoing mail server. Then assign the correct dial-up method to each account (landline via normal access code, VMC card via the VMC Internet access) and define the default......

A bit complicated....why? Surely the installation software should have been able to do all this with transparency to the customer?

But at least it now works!

[BEagle]

Well - it worked until early July when it died. After much fruitless arguing with both Vodafone and the place I bought the card (including sitting in the shop refusing to move until they'd agreed to replace it), they exchanged it for another on 10 July. Which worked fine until early last week until it too died having exhibited the same symptoms as the first one. 2 hours on the phone to various people at Vodafone again today with no saisfactory outcome.....

These cards are obviously insufficiently reliable for general use....