Today I tried to use my mobile internet card on the train as I was travelling from Coventry to Manchester. In the 2 hour journey, all I manged to do was send two emails and find out some train times.

The coverage in stations was not too bad, often I got UMTS. However, it took a number of seconds to establish connections, and by that time the train was pulling away.

When travelling, the signal was very inconsistant, much like using a normal mobile phone on the train. The data card seemed to lock up a couple of times, and I had to remove it and restart the software to kick it into touch. It also got confused about when to switch from GPRS to UMTS, and vice versa, presumably because the relative signal strengths were changing too fast for its little brain.

It is nice toy, and useful when I am at uni as the university wireless is intermittant, and they block useful ports like 110 and 25 which stops me using thunderbird. However, it is less useful when travelling due to lack of decent signal.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Computer, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.