T mobile internet dongle slow help plse

ketherin

Hi all i have a T mobile internet dongle on my laptop running windows xp, the internet speed was fine until a couple of weeks ago now its slow very slow loading pages. the network connection speed says 7.2 Mbps, speed and Signal strength excellent ?

Tried it on a couple of other laptops and all the same really slo,w is it the dongle, the T mobile coverage or what else...any help greatly accepted....this is a laptop I've set up for my elderly Dad who just wants to surf a bit & use E-mail to keep in touch with his brandchildren dotted around the world. Thank you for any help

Strider590

Sounds like it's T mobile that have the problem.

Remember, if you have to phone them on an 0870 number, go to "saynoto0870.com" and find the direct line.

macman

Mobile broadband is totally dependent on a decent 3G connection, if it can't get a reliable 3G signal it steps down to near dial up speeds. So it may work well in one location but crawl in another. It will say on the dongle icon what speed it is connecting and whether 3G or not.
7.2 MBps is the theoretical maximum, you will be lucky to get 30% of that, if you could get 7.2Mbps you would be laughing.

bargainhunter_2009

Also you could have problem with the dongle or the driver itself. And sometimes people fail to realise that the personal firewall can be behind the slow speed. And run a full virus check to make sure that the speed is not affected by some kind of virus programmes.

If you are using an old computer, it is also possible that you have less memory while working. And if your dad is used to a lot of short cuts on the desktop, it may drain the memory on start up.

So get rid of any short cuts that you do not need, also the icons that you see on the tray by the clock? Try to minimise their presence as well.

If the computer has worked with good speed before in the same location then it's something within the PC that has changed.

Finally, if you think that there is nothing wrong with the computer, then yo might want to use another computer and use it there to check the dongle. What if it's faulty?

Armengar

The fastest I have EVER had was a 1k connection according to speedtest.net

M4RKM

speedtest.net seems to give some really erroneous results when it comes to testing on a mobile broadband system.

I did that once and it was coming up at something really slow, but checked on thinkbroadband.com and came up at around 3mb..