Disconnected from the hive mind

Well I’m definitely giving my Vodafone card a run for its money.  Or for the 50 quid or so I pay every month for unlimited access…. which, for me, actually means using it once or twice on the train and a few times in a hotel lobby when there’s no wireless internet.  Or when the wireless internet is priced at a ridiculous amount.

It’s been a while since I’ve continuously used the Vodafone card.   I’ve been forced to swap to it full time while the Bulldog DSL connection is coughing and spluttering all over the place.  It’s possibly a billing issue.  Possibly an upgrade issue.  No one knows.  It might be active by 6pm today, just in time for the weekend………

The last time I tried using the Vodafone card properly was in a fit of urgency.  Flying along the M40 towards Reading at 70mph and trying to edit some configuration files via SSH.  Needless to say the connection wasn’t that brilliant.

However, sat at home looking out the sunny window bashing away on the laptop, the Vodafone 3g service is almost a broadband replacement.  It’s consistently fast, responsive .. and the best thing?  Well, you can always tell how good an internet connection is by the latency.  The easiest way to experience this is with an SSH connection directly to the server.

I have one open now.  It’s terribly fast.  Terribly responsive.  I could, at a stretch, use this internet connection on-going.   Granted I’d need to be careful about going over the ‘unlimited limit’ in terms of data transfer.  The last thing you need is a £2.35/meg bill on an extra 1,000 meg of data usage.  😉

So as long as you’re standing still and not changing cell zones every 30 seconds, it’s usable. 

Fantastic job, Vodafone.