Tuesday 14 October 2008

3g

The only small issue with my mooring is the lack of wireless or 3g for browsing while on board. If I look at the coverage maps its hard to gauge if I should be getting 3g. According to 3 I should and Vodafone is not sure... I am on Vodaphone so I can reliably say there is no 3g at Hunts lock on Vodafone.

It got me thinking that we (boaters) should share our knowledge of signals on mobile broadband on the canal. if I was any good I'd write a web site detailing it but I'm not so I won't.

Anyhow for the record Vodafone is not good at Hunts lock - anyone got a 3 mobile or modem to let me know if it's worth me spending 50 quid to get a back up 3 3g dongle??

Nev

4 comments:

Adam said...

We used our 3 dongle for the first time during our fortnight on board in September, and found we got a signal in most places (although we weren't in your area). We found that what made a huge difference was putting the dongle on an extension cable and hanging it in the window. In some places, it made the difference between getting on line and having no signal at all. I don't know whether you're using an extension cable, but if you're not, give it a try.

Nev Wells said...

Adam,

Were you getting a 3g connection or 2g (GPRS) ? If 3 gives such good coverage I might just blow 50 quid on one to keep on the boat.

I have dangled my modem out of the window but it did not improve the connection speed. I even tried using a pringles tin to try and direct the feed.

Take care

Nev

Adam said...

We were getting 3G. In fact, we were getting HSDPA, which is (I'm told) better than 3G. There were a couple of places the signal was a bit dodgy, but on the whole we were very pleased with it. I gather that 3's customer service call centre may leave something to be desired, but thankfully we never needed it!

MortimerBones said...

I use 3 and have no trouble at all. I have a long cable on it so I can hang it out the window....