Mobile broadband in caravan - can anyone advise?

Karinalou_2

Its a common problem we have whenwe are trying to sell 3 that people believe the coverage is no good. This dates back to several years ago when 3 was a relatively small network and at the time did have very little coverage. When people say this I always ask them to remember when T-Mobile was one2one (or one2noone!) and had really bad coverage issues. It was bought out by Deutche Telecom who really invested in it. Same as what 3 has been doing over the past 18 months!

Steph998

Thanks Dave, just had a look at 3's pay as you go. It does have an expiry tho'...mind you, I would probs use whole lot in one weekend!

Edit: now.....how do I find out what 1GB would give me...all I do is surf the net, keep my business website up to date (no uploading or downloading) sit on MSE, email, check my student son is still alive in his flat ...on MSN, and fill out paid surveys for PineCone! (Hmmm.....if I did three a month..I could pay for the usage...!)

littleboo

Have a look at the O2 PAYG mobile broadband. You get 30 day money back guarantee so you can try it in situ and providing you top up with £15 in the first two months, the cashback through Quidco exceeds the cost of the dongle.

macman

Steph998 wrote: »

Thanks Dave, just had a look at 3's pay as you go. It does have an expiry tho'...mind you, I would probs use whole lot in one weekend!

Edit: now.....how do I find out what 1GB would give me...all I do is surf the net, keep my business website up to date (no uploading or downloading) sit on MSE, email, check my student son is still alive in his flat ...on MSN, and fill out paid surveys for PineCone! (Hmmm.....if I did three a month..I could pay for the usage...!)

1Gb would probably be enough, it all depends on what you do, you can only try it out for a month and see what usage you clock up. NB: If you're updating a website then you are still uploading/downloading data, if you just view a webpage you are still downloading that page.

Steph998

Thanks Macman...I think I meant I would not be uploading photos, which I regularly do from the home PC.

peregrin

I used a 3 PAYG dongle for a few weeks whilst my home Internet was out of service and don't think I ever got close to 1Gb during normal use, which was general surfing, e-mail, downloading some music from iTunes etc. It's probably more than enough. However you can get larger data limits if you pay more.

They have a website (My3) that you can check your usage at any time, so just try it for a while and keep an eye on it.

I was quite impressed with the speed, but have a strong 3G signal. On sustained data transfers (e.g. downloading something) it was about equivalent to 1Mbps which isn't too bad... 3Mb music track in about 30 seconds.

3 do some other prepaid packages if you are happy to pay in advance for a longer period, 12Gb of data valid for a year (rather than 30 days) is £100 which includes a modem - there's also a 24Gb valid for two years, I have that on my key ring if I ever need to use it. These have the advantages that you can effectively carry data over throughout the 12 months (for instance), so I might use 500Mb in Month 1 and then have 11.5Gb left instead of losing the 500Mb at the end of the 30 days which would be the case if I bought the 1Gb package.

Steph998

Thanks.

Can I ask one more thing?

Again, sorry if this is a bit of a 'doh' question, but I really have not got a clue.

The laptop I have is set up to automatically connect thorough my wireless and talk invantel USB.


How would it know to use the dongle when we were away from home? I have never used any other way of connecting to the net, so maybe someone could 'baby talk' me through what I have to do....:)

Thanks!

macman

The dongle will install it's own software and put an icon onto your desktop. Just double click on this to open the program, click 'connect' and off you go. It won't be able to find your wireless network away from home anyway. A good idea to turn the wireless off while dongling-wireless drains a lot of battery power.

theGR8Rgood

The article at caravantalk.org.uk/index.php?showtopic=24822 may help for things relating to Mobile Broadband / Mobile Internet Access / Wi-Fi / Using an External-Antenna in a Caravan.

Cheers,
Andy