Vodafone USB stick offers 7.2Mbps mobile broadband

Version 1 said on Monday, 14 January 2008

We have this on two work laptops and speed is about 1 to 1.5 meg

silverous said on Monday, 14 January 2008

Are you sure you don't have previous gen device or the signal in your area isn't falling back to 3g due to coverage of the new service (mostly some areas of london by the sound of it) ?

discogcu said on Monday, 14 January 2008

"This is 14 and 22 times faster respectively than the original 3G service launched in 2004, according to Vodafone."



Well done to vodafone for being faster than threes highs speeds, but hang on .... , "The service is currently only available in parts of central London and at major airports."

Useless !

Luddite said on Tuesday, 15 January 2008

Should be investigated by the regulators over these claims which only work in optimal lab conditions.

The goverments greed to milk the 3G Licenses has led in part to these laughable 18 month contracts for what is a low speed, high latency ripoff.

I urge everybody not to give the vodafone profiteers money.


ever.

Jamie said on Wednesday, 16 January 2008

Its a shame vodafone dont offer good 3g coverage orange has to be the best i have 2 k800i phones one on vodafone and one on orange i do alot of travelling and vodafone is worse 3g wise orange's 3g signal is just as good as there standard 2.5g signal, but out of all the places i have been vodafone tends to drop of 3g and when orange has a full signal on 3g vodafone has 2/5 bars or sometimes 3/5 i have even swapped the sims in the phones and the same result vodafone sucks!

Alex M London said on Wednesday, 16 January 2008

I pay £7 a month for 1000mb limit on orange 3g contract, Oh and i agree with you about vodafone's 3g its the same story with o2 and t-mobile they all suck with 3g lol!

Lolz said on Wednesday, 16 January 2008

I get about 120kbps not 7.2 meg which would be about 770kbps? its a ripoff but im stuck with it now :(
Should of just used my orange phone with the usb cable =[

Andrew said on Thursday, 17 January 2008

technically 3 and T-Mobile now have the best 3G coverage, which pretty soon will almost blanket the UK as much as 2G

and the vast majority of it is 3.6MBPs, unlike the punk 1.8 vodafone give outside london

also, the speed you get relies on the speed of the technology (the "current" usb modems that every network sells are a max of 3.6mbps"). You'll usually get between 1mbps and 1.8mbps on 1.8 and 3.6 devices respecitvely due to the fact that the network can only cope with so much data.

and technically o2's 3g network is terrible: 60% of the UK and next to no HSDPA... orange and vodafone are about the same now with around 75-80%, and they are apparently thinking about mergine. T-Mobile and 3 are in the process of merging their 3g networks now

Version 1 said on Thursday, 17 January 2008

Apologies, we are not in London.

allan said on Tuesday, 22 January 2008

i was told by t-mobile cs today that they are rolling out 7.2mbps - date set at March 17th.

they also stated that if you have the £12.50pm web'n'walk Plus, the price will stay the same. i asked if using my mda varia II as a modem would be as fast as the new vario III and they said no.

i'd rather have vodafone's usb stick at £30pm. i remember vodafone at least USED to have good coverage. i know t-mobile doesn't

allan said on Thursday, 24 January 2008

UDATE on my previous post:
just did a post code check on the t-moble website for location coverage. it returned good results (i.e. excellent coverage) for a specified post code which i am moving to.

then i rang t-mobile and got them to do the same thing. their results were VERY different. get this: they even stated that only 2g is available there! there isn't even 3g available at that location - which totally contradicts their website's results.

so potential buyers beware. don't go and get stuck in a 12, 18, 24 month contract without first testing it over at least a 7 day period (there should be up to a 14-day returns policy)

allan said on Tuesday, 29 January 2008

VERY LAST UDATE:
got it. tried it. returned it.
it's like using a dialup connection, with even worse results because everything is 'downsampled'

it's overpriced for what it is (or rather what you get). the technology exists to make it happen but the network providers don't want the cost of providing full network coverage. thus, not many people will subscibe. hence the high price.. i.e. to make it financially viable to the network providers.

FINAL VERDICT: i wouldn't subscribe for even £10 per month. although it's worth £10 per month WITHOUT a contract if you only need it the odd month