The great 3G data card road test

Scenario 5: On the train from Reading to London Paddington
This was the point when the limitations of 3G became obvious…

T-Mobile
T-Mobile said it had a 3G connection as the train stood in the station, but this quickly dropped to GPRS as we pulled out before disappearing altogether.

Orange
The Orange card refused to give a connection for the first half of the journey, but perked up at Slough with a 31Kbps link. It wouldn't say whether we were on 3G or GPRS, but was soon reduced to staggering along at just 700 bytes per second.

Vodafone
3G as we got on, but very quickly the client software admitted it was "acquiring" a network connection. Once it jumped back to 3G we enjoyed a surge of bandwidth, over 100Kbps, but the connection stopped as we tried the download from Scenario 2 again. It stuck on a miserly 6Kbps for many minutes, before suddenly climbing back to 80 to 100Kbps. The full download took 11 minutes.

Attempts to get a VPN running were fruitless -- suggesting the connection was so slow that the initial handshakes timed out. Instant messenging worked fine most of the way.

02
Refused to get 3G/GPRS, then offered it but failed to connect.

Occasionally the software would alert us that we were in range of a Wi-Fi hot spot accessible through our subscription. But we never managed to get a connection -- doubtless because by the time we'd clicked connect the access point was a couple of miles back down the track.

Scenario 6: Paddington Station
The number of pastry shops at Paddington station is surpassed only by the number of Wi-Fi hot spots...

T-Mobile
Offers in its 3G data card package access to its network of Wi-Fi hotspots, which now number almost a thousand including all the main London stations. The software discovered and connected to the Paddington Wi-Fi hotspot without incident.

02
Also offers Wi-Fi access, in the shape of an account for BT Openzone hot spots, though you do need an O2 handset for authentication and billing. The O2 software pulled a trick that we recognised from our earlier review of the T-Mobile software, and refused to acknowledge that the Toshiba had Wi-Fi. After uninstalling the Wi-Fi driver, and letting the hardware wizard in the control panel reinstall it we persuaded the O2 card that the Tosh really did have Wi-Fi, and we were then able to discover the hot spots.

Vodafone
The client software detected the presence of an "unsupported hot spot" -- i.e. one where access is not possible through a Vodafone subscription. We had no trouble connecting to the hot spot directly -- indicating Vodafone's client software doesn't interfere with a laptop's other connectivity tools.

Orange
No connection.