Vodafone Mobile Connect USB modem: not exactly great
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on Monday, April 02, 2007 at 6:12 AM.
£45 a month is rather a lot to pay for access to the Internet, even if that access is high speed and available more or less anywhere you can get a mobile signal. Even so, in my line oF work being able to get web access anywhere without having to hunt around for a wifi hotspot (which usually means sitting in Starbucks drinking crappy coffee for an hour) is very useful. So I decided to sign up to Vodafone's Mobile Connect service. Rather than the old style plugin card, you get a dinky little lozenge-shaped modem that connects to your laptop's USB port. The modem automatically checks for a signal, connecting at 56Kps by default but achieving megabit speeds if a 3G network is available.
I added the billing to my Vodafone business account and gleefully scuttled home with my new toy.
The disappointment began five minutes later. First off, I discovered that what is advertised as an "unlimited" plan isn't exactly unlimited. Vodafone's small print informed me that, for the purposes of the Mobile Connect USB Modem, the word "unlimited" means "1 gig of downloads per month". A single gig isn't very much even by standard business use, so calling an account with a 1 gig practical limit "unlimited" is, frankly, taking the piss.
Second, the Mobile Connect does not like Macs. After an hour messing around trying to make it work, I phoned the helpline. The guy at the other end told me that it doesn't really work very well with Macs, and offered me my money back. This apparently, was old news at Vodafone HQ - but it seems they chose to advertise it as being Mac-compatible, oh, just for the hell of it. After a lot of messing about, reinstalling the driver software twice and doing some seriously kinky messing about at the command prompt, I got the thing working.
A month down the line, I've got a new laptop. Now I discover that if Vodafone Mobile Connect doesn't like Macs, it just doesn't understand Windows Vista at all. According to Vodafone, the right drivers will be available next month. Or the month after. Even though the Vista API was released to developers in January 2006. So right now I'm paying £45 per month for a connection I can't even use with my main work laptop, which is running Microsoft's now-mainstream OS. When I bought the bloody thing, there was nothing in the documentation to indicate that Vista compatibility might be a problem.
So what we have here is a product that could be quite good but actually sucks quite hard, probably because it was pushed through and released too early. It's also fecking expensive. Conclusion: don't bother.
tags: Vodafone, wireless, 3G
I added the billing to my Vodafone business account and gleefully scuttled home with my new toy.
The disappointment began five minutes later. First off, I discovered that what is advertised as an "unlimited" plan isn't exactly unlimited. Vodafone's small print informed me that, for the purposes of the Mobile Connect USB Modem, the word "unlimited" means "1 gig of downloads per month". A single gig isn't very much even by standard business use, so calling an account with a 1 gig practical limit "unlimited" is, frankly, taking the piss.
Second, the Mobile Connect does not like Macs. After an hour messing around trying to make it work, I phoned the helpline. The guy at the other end told me that it doesn't really work very well with Macs, and offered me my money back. This apparently, was old news at Vodafone HQ - but it seems they chose to advertise it as being Mac-compatible, oh, just for the hell of it. After a lot of messing about, reinstalling the driver software twice and doing some seriously kinky messing about at the command prompt, I got the thing working.
A month down the line, I've got a new laptop. Now I discover that if Vodafone Mobile Connect doesn't like Macs, it just doesn't understand Windows Vista at all. According to Vodafone, the right drivers will be available next month. Or the month after. Even though the Vista API was released to developers in January 2006. So right now I'm paying £45 per month for a connection I can't even use with my main work laptop, which is running Microsoft's now-mainstream OS. When I bought the bloody thing, there was nothing in the documentation to indicate that Vista compatibility might be a problem.
So what we have here is a product that could be quite good but actually sucks quite hard, probably because it was pushed through and released too early. It's also fecking expensive. Conclusion: don't bother.
tags: Vodafone, wireless, 3G
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