Internet Dongles - are they worth it?

-westy-

-westy-

-westy-

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Hi,

I've got sick of the dodgy internet where I live (borrowing someone else's internet) - so I'm looking at getting a 3G internet dongle.

I've been into Vodafone who supply my phone contract and I can get an unlimited internet package for £20 a month, albeit with an excessive usage policy, which throttles down after about 5GB or so, which to be fair is still pretty quick, it slows down to around 4m/bit.

Am I wasting my time? Getting proper landline internet isn't an option.

Thanks.
 
If your not doing any gaming and aren't a heavy user and live in an area with ok signal its not bad... don't expect massive speeds tho - 500-1600kbit/s are quite common...

EDIT: You sure those package details are correct? vodafone doesn't seem to do a package - special offer or otherwise - that throttles down after X amount of usage.
 
Last edited:
Rroff said:
If your not doing any gaming and aren't a heavy user and live in an area with ok signal its not bad... don't expect massive speeds tho - 500-1600kbit/s are quite common...

EDIT: You sure those package details are correct? vodafone doesn't seem to do a package - special offer or otherwise - that throttles down after X amount of usage.
Click to expand...

No, they don't, unlimited packages are for business users - however some persuasion of the manager in-store gave me that deal. Apparently it just throttles down after 5GB a month, instead of going deadly slow.
 
Yeah, its pretty easy for a Vodafone store to flag you as a business user and give you the 'Business Broadband' deal - £18/m + VAT.

I will warn you, the throttling is harsh, brings it down to 384Kbits/s - which can be crushing.

As for are they worth it? I wouldn't use it for my main internet connection if there were any options available, but I have one around permanently as a back up.
 
Rids said:
Yeah, its pretty easy for a Vodafone store to flag you as a business user and give you the 'Business Broadband' deal - £18/m + VAT.

I will warn you, the throttling is harsh, brings it down to 384Kbits/s - which can be crushing.

As for are they worth it? I wouldn't use it for my main internet connection if there were any options available, but I have one around permanently as a back up.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think it worked out to £20.70 a month.

Is 384kbits/s really that slow though?!

To be honest my main internet usage is just browsing, plus downloading music from iTunes etc.
 
Out of interest, notice your location says Surrey, what Vodafone store you going into as thats my old neck of the woods.
 
Thats about 44KByte/s of actual usable bandwidth once you've used your 5gig... just under 3 minutes to download your average mp3 file... but not enough to use iplayer and the likes.
 
Rroff said:
Thats about 44KByte/s of actual usable bandwidth once you've used your 5gig... just under 3 minutes to download your average mp3 file... but not enough to use iplayer and the likes.
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Ouch, I didn't realise it'd be that slow...that's crap :(

Rids - I'm actually in London now, this was in the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush.
 
My actual download speed is somewhere in the region of 500KB/s (according to Speedtest), as you can expect with Virgin down ADSL lines. It's good 'enough' as long as there is only one user connected, even get a fair bit of gaming done. Would love it to be faster though.
 
Right,

I got Mobile Broadband. Got it on Three Mobile broadband dongle. Get 5Gb allowance, fot £15 per, month rolling contract. It's good.
Depends where you live aswell. If im downstairs i'll get 2bars out of 5. Upstairs il get 3Bars if im lucky il get 4.

Interms of download, it aint that good. But for small files and bits and bats its ok. As for gaming, No chance in hell. The only game i can play online is Modern Warefare2.
And dont even ask i how manage to play it online. lol :D
 
Or, get an HD2 with unlimited web bolt on for £5 extra, and set it up as a wireless router. Your laptop will then see a wireless network, with encryption, that you can connect to and use like a regular router plugged into the wall.

Big advantage here, by example, a mate of mine only gets mobile signal for his dongle in his house by his downstairs window, with the HD2, leave the phone by the window and have a wireless connection to it :)
 
I've been using a 3 dongle since August (moved out of house end of July, only moved into new house a week before Christmas - feels ages ago now... - and haven't had the Sky Broadband setup yet) and I must say I am impressed with it.
I'm a bit of a WoW whore and it's fine for that in all honesty, alright it's slightly laggy but in no way is it unplayable, it's just like playing the game normally.
I tried playing CS:Source on it and the Source engine did not like it one bit, everything was disconnecting and throwing a tantrum so I gave up with that. CS1.6 however was a different story, that worked fine and again, although laggy it was not unplayable (was roughly a 100-180ms ingame latency, sits around 100ms on ventrilo). Downloading for me is fine, the connection is infact so good it beats around 60% of the UK on broadband. Download speed sits anywhere between 30KB/s up to 500KB/s and the upload speed is quite impressive, peaking at about 400KB/s last time I uploaded a video to YouTube. Overall I'm very pleased with it, but it's starting to cost a fortune to keep it going (on a Pay As You Go type thing whereby you top-up your account with say £15 for 3GB bandwidth); all in all I must have spent close to £100 including purchasing the dongle+1GB start package (from Argos for £30 I think) and all subsequent top-ups.
 
-westy- said:
Hi,

I've got sick of the dodgy internet where I live (borrowing someone else's internet) - so I'm looking at getting a 3G internet dongle.

I've been into Vodafone who supply my phone contract and I can get an unlimited internet package for £20 a month, albeit with an excessive usage policy, which throttles down after about 5GB or so, which to be fair is still pretty quick, it slows down to around 4m/bit.

Am I wasting my time? Getting proper landline internet isn't an option.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

I use my tethered BlackBerry tobrowse the internet on my laptop while at work and it works perfectly fine, can't you do this and save a lot of money?

I have a 500meg limit though as I'm with Vodafone but I only browse and listen to last.fm a little at work and I never go over.
 
I use one as my only means of internet, and well can't really grumble.

Though during the week, it is mind numbingly slow and has to be reset to work a lot!! Two pages max some days. Grrrr.

Can't really complain though.
 
I use 3 5gb at £15/m. But I have the Mi-Fi one which allows 5 devices to connect using it.

Very impressed with it, esp. considering I was expecting the worst. Have barely used half the allowance this month but being, the first I was being careful. I used to game on normal bb but since I've got it, I've not tried at all because I imagine it will use every ounce of data left. Might try though at some point.

Speeds are good; upload is even faster than my VM at my parents' home!

Every so often, say once an evening, it disconnects but a turn off and on seems to resolve it. Haven't had connection problems in Winchester. My housemate who uses O2 says his isn't very good.
 
Gaming will typically use around 60Mb an hour on average... so unless you spend 8+ hours a day playing online it probably won't be an issue bandwidth wise... but the latency is rarely if ever under 100ms and usually spiking a LOT making most games unplayable for most people and extremely annoying for anyone else on the server as you warp around like crazy.
 
I've got a Vodafone dongle and it's very good in 3G+ areas, good enough to stream video, but very slow if you are outside 3G areas. It all really depends which provider's signal is best in your area. When you are outside 3G then even basic browsing is very slow, frustratingly slow really.

Rgds
 
Forgot to mention, on the weekends I can game and stream videos easily. Also download films, music quickly. Just peak hours that suck.
 
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