Well i am back! just about, not been here posting lately and its not without good reasons too, the obvious one is i went to Zimbabwe for 3 weeks over christmas and GOT MARRIED!!!
some others may have wondered why its taken me so long to get this up and posted but that too is not without a good reason either. I wont bore you with the details but the shortest summary i can give you is that i applied for a phone line and broadband before we left at the beginning of december as a migration to take the existing line on, but when we got back BT had terminated the existing line and BeThere couldnt process that order so we had to put a whole new order in, which means BT openreach have to install a new line, and by install i mean pretty much plug it back in at the exchange. In BT Openreach’s infinitely efficient wisdom, i have to wait a further 6 weeks for the line to be activated (on my birthday no less), the ironic thing is. if i wanted to pay more to get less and went with BT direct, my phone line would probably have been activated in less time by the same external company (Openreach).
so i titled this post, Mobile Broadband makes you efficient, so i better say something about that! all i can say it does. My work relies on having an internet connection to be able to do my job, i need to communicate with clients often over skype or email and IM etc, i actually need to work on remote web servers (its funny how that needs an internet connection) among various other things. my options were pay £35 for access to a BT openzone wifi spot of which there just so happens to be one within reach of my flat (oh the irony) or about the same price for a pay as you go mobile broadband dongle with O2. I found out with some earlier research that the openzone in my flat’s range is not some proper openzone but a slightly dodgy openzone run off the back of someones BusinessHub and tends to only work in my living room or more often than not, only when i didnt want to use it. That left me with only one option, Mobile Broadband.
so it makes me more efficient. Why? because i just so happen to live in that one flat in Zone 1 London that has a very poor 3g signal on pretty much all the networks 🙁 this means that my 3g mobile broadband is more often than not working on low speed (boy am i glad that SSH is text based and doesnt require broadband!) and it tends to disconnect a lot, not to mention because i am a mac user, i am somewhat shunned by mobile broadband companies because i cant get access to any of the wifi points easily without using bootcamp, so am forced to just stick it out on mobile signal.
so i have to be more efficient for 2 reasons. firstly, speed, because the net speed is so low compared to modern broadband via adsl or cable i cant get as much done as i normally would, this means i need to multi task all my internet usage tasks as much as i can and basically queue up internet tasks to maximise my connected time, especially when i hit into free public wifi or into university (my uni just got hit with about 4GB of iplayer downloads this week alone!).
Secondly, mobile broadband accounts are generally all bandwith capped or charge per MB/GB, i use O2 and they charge about £15 per 2GB for 31 days and i seem to be getting through one every 2 weeks or so. because of this i have to be much more aware of what i do online, this means i have facebooked less, twittered less and more importantly watched less video and less random surfing. you would probably be surprised at how much time can be gained by cutting all that stuff out. its kind of scary that just doing the basics for work uses so much, imagine how much bandwith (and cost) i would be using if i was just surfing and working at full capacity as i normally would, thankfully the iphone has helped in keeping in touch via facebook and twitter so i have been making the most of that data connection as well, but it does highlight how in todays civilisation we are pretty much dependant on the internet for our way of life and keeping in touch.
other quick round up since december. Uni is ok, little boring and frustrating at the moment and i wish it was just over already (only 18 months left), i go on second honeymoon (because one is not enough!) for a week over the week of my birthday, should be a nice relaxing week after the manic start to the year, and i should also return to working internet amongst other things!
will try and post here as i can and as time allows
When I moved, we had to wait 6 weeks to get internet access (we were having a new phone line put in too) so we had to get mobile broadband to use the internet. We tried O2, then t-mobile and finally Three.
O2 – Quite possibly the worst service in the world. I live in the middle of a busy town and I was getting disconnected every 2 minutes and extremely slow speeds (around 30kb/s).
T-mobile – Worked ok, not great speeds, low signal and quite pricey when buying more bandwidth.
Three – I was amazed, full signal and I was downloading files at around 600kb/s. They also have great prices on bandwidth. The only downside was you had to sign up for a monthly contract (You could cancel at the end of the month, if not it would just auto-renew)