The great 3G data card road test

Scenario 2: The Heston M4 Moto service station, over coffee and muffins.
Action: Downloading a 2.7MB PowerPoint presentation.
3G coverage is limited to major towns and cities. In the rest of the country, the cards drop down to GPRS - which is much less useful for activities such as downloading large files.

T-Mobile
As we began the 2.7MB download using the T-Mobile card, the card dropped the connection twice. When it did get going it did so at a sedate 550 bytes per second. The problem was that although the card and the software agreed that we had a 3G connection, as soon as we began the download they revised their mutual opinion and decided that it was really just a GPRS connection after all. The full 2.7MB file would have taken 46 minutes to download had we waited, even after the card shifted up a gear part-way through to 2.5Kbps a second.

Vodafone
Vodafone appeared to be the only one of the three cards still providing a 3G connection as we rolled into the service station. It certainly coped well with the download -- finishing the task in 1min 17 seconds. During this time the client software registered three bars on the signal reader -- poorer than in the heart of London, but still clearly up to the task

Orange
To test whether the laptop, rather than the card was at fault, we loaded the Orange software onto an identical Toshiba laptop. However the card caused exactly the same problems as it had on the previous Toshiba; the software said it was connected, but no applications - browsers and IM alike - wanted to know.

The problem, as it turned out, was with the driver. Like the T-Mobile installation, O2 uses the hardware discovery wizard in Windows to find and install the driver (supplied on the accompanying CD-Rom). Like the T-Mobile installation, this is flaky at best. Luckily we had the Orange CD-Rom with us, and a bit of exploration through the directories turned up a self-installing driver file, which cured the problem when we ran it.

The lesson here is don't lose your installation CD-Rom; the last time we looked, Novatel did not offer drivers for download, and neither did the telcos.

Once up and running, the Orange card claimed to be connected to 3G, but actually only tackled the download at GPRS speeds. We terminated the attempt after it became clear it would take around 58 minutes to complete -- a figure that indicated there were times when no data transfer was taking place at all.

02
The O2 card had also given up giving us 3G by the time we reached the services. Even for GPRS its connection speed was poor, often around the 4Kbps mark. We began the download, and stopped it once it was clear it would take 13 minutes.