Tag: mobile broadband

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When hotel wifi becomes a good idea

Tim Deluca-Smith

I’ve been sent a new mobile broadband USB ‘dongle’ from O2 to replace the one I’ve been using for the last 18 months. Good timing, the old one is a little unreliable now and I’ve got three days on the road ahead of me. I figured the 90 minute train journey into London would be a good opportunity to install the software. This was a bad idea. In fact, I’m amazed that a Tier One operator still hasn’t got the basic ‘out of box’ experience right. Here’s how that 90 minute train journey was spent… Dongle is nicely packaged with … Continue reading When hotel wifi becomes a good idea

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“Sorry Mr Mobile Broadband Customer, our network is congested. Would you mind if we switched on web compression?”

Tim Deluca-Smith

That’s what I would have liked to have heard from my service provider. Instead, and without warning, I fired up my mobile broadband dongle this week to find my browser was displaying images in low resolution. I’m not talking a slight downgrade in picture quality here, I’m talking the turning of Facebook thumbnails into blurry smudges. At first I figured this was a Firefox setting that had been corrupted, so I tried IE 8. Same experience. And then I realised that I was only experiencing this downgrade in quality when connected to O2 mobile broadband. Make a WiFi connection and … Continue reading “Sorry Mr Mobile Broadband Customer, our network is congested. Would you mind if we switched on web compression?”