Review: Three Mobile Broadband with Huawei E586 MiFi

Disclaimer: I work for Three UK, but this article is written from my personal perspective.

I moved house recently - before I started working for Three - and two things crossed my mind. Firstly, we'd need broadband. Secondly, broadband meant getting a landline.

We never use our landline for calls. There's no point. In fact the only time it gets used is when one person, who shall remain nameless, calls us to say hello each Sunday morning. But beyond that, it's sole use is hauling data. Being outside the Virgin Media cabled area, that means being at the mercy of BT's copper lines.

With this in mind, we dutifully contracted Sky to install a landline and provide broadband service, and currently we're paying £19.75 a month for the privilege.

However, since joining Three, I've become more and more aware of the Mobile Broadband services they do, and in particular the MiFi thing. If you've not heard of a MiFi, think a home WiFi router, that works over the mobile networks - so no need for a landline at all - and can be taken anywhere in the UK that has mobile signal.

I thought I'd give it a go, so signed up to one of the 1-month rolling contracts to give it a try. Mainly out of curiosity, because our Sky landline contract still has 4 months left to go, so there's no impending need to change. However, I'm strongly considering it.

It costs me £15.99 a month for 5GB with a £49.99 charge for the unit, but this changes to a more favourable £18.99 for 15GB with the unit included on signing up to a 2-year contract.


The easiest way to explain why I love it so much, apart from the obvious portability and cost benefits, is the speed - which is demonstrated best with the following speed tests, comparing my regular landline broadband to Three's MiFi...

So, where I live at least, Three's MiFi is nearly twice as fast on download, and well over twice as fast on upload, than regular BT landline broadband. Of course, your mileage may vary, but I hope it shows that when looking into getting the internet at home, a landline is not the only option on the menu...

How To Avoid A Nasty Mobile Phone Bill

These days, it's almost impossible to see a week go by without seeing a news story about Mr (or Mrs) X from Somewhereton complaining that they've been on the receiving end of a bill for thousands of pounds after their mobile phone being lost or stolen and used for calls to far flung countries.

These news reports usually consist of the person in question spouting how it's a disgrace, followed by the press officer for the network in question wheeling out the usual company line. A stock VT of a phone bill, a debt collector with a clipboard, and a picture of somewhere in Iran usually accompany.

But who is really to blame? In my opinion, it's you - the mobile owner who hasn't considered security options. It's like leaving your car unlocked with the keys in and hoping nobody takes it.

Step one: Change the PIN on your SIM from the default, and activate it. This way, when the handset is switched on, the PIN is required before any calls can be made.

Step two: Most people think a SIM PIN is enough, but no. Back to the car analogy, that is like locking your car then leaving the keys on the roof. You need to activate the handset lock as well, and put the delay as short as you can bear - mine locks after 60 seconds of non-use.

So there you have it. Simple ways to stop yourself being on the receiving end of a £2000 bill for calls to Nigeria.

Those who don't heed this advice, I have no sympathy for you... Just a big bill.

Facebook To Start Charging?

Something is going around Facebook at the moment, a status of viral nature that claims that the mighty Facebook is planning to start charging for access to the service, but that by copying and pasting a status about it, your icon will turn blue (I'm not quite sure which "icon" it refers to, as the Facebook logo is already blue), and you will get your daily dose of status updates free for life.

Now, first of all, let me point out - Facebook is not going to start charging. I'll repeat that for anyone who's skim-reading this article, and missed the last sentence - Facebook is NOT going to start charging.

Now we've got that out of the way, consider this. What if it were true? What if they did decide that, come the end of the year, they were going to nab a crisp twenty from each user for access?

Remember that the whole premise of Facebook is like that of a party. It is social. If they charge, a good portion of your friends will leave. And so, even if you're getting your admission for free, none of your friends are there, and so the party is ultimately shit. You've bought yourself a free ticket to a night at the house of that kid nobody likes.

Next, it would be awful bad business sense. Facebook relies on ads, yes, those things at the right of the screen. They're paid on the number of people that see them. Less users means less money. And they probably make more money now from you by matching you with advertisers (ever notice the ads are always highly targeted at someone who seems to match your exact description?) than they ever would by losing half their userbase and charging the other half.

In conclusion, I'm not sure who I'd like to slap more - the marketing genius who is the first person to make up the story about charging, or the millions of idiots who are blindly copying and pasting it, the same millions of idiots who are procreating as we speak, muddying the collective gene pool by spawning baby idiots to overrun the world.

The Cost Of 360-Degree Contacts

There's a new craze sweeping the mobile phone world. Born off the back of the explosion in social networking and online media, phones are ever-increasingly looking after our contact lists to give us a "360-degree view" of our friends, family, and colleagues.

Look through your phone book. There's a good chance that a good number of them have a Facebook account. Another chunk of them will have a presence on Twitter. A few will have MySpace accounts. Some will be on LinkedIn. A fair few more will be on Windows Live - albeit unknowingly, as everyone seems to still call it MSN.

And then there will be a crossover group - those who have accounts on more than one service.

It became clear to me, when plumbing my account details for the various services I use into my Windows Phone, that there's a wealth of information out there on each and every one of my contacts. The phone offers to collate it all into one "card" for each contact - which is great, to a degree.

The problem lies, however, in that people are human. They do things differently from day to day. Some people have multiple email addresses that they use, so the system can't determine that they're the same person, and can't link them together - resulting in multiple listings for the same person, with the information spread across two.

So, I appeal to everyone out there using the internet. Please, use just one email address, preferably with the format firstname-dot-lastname, maybe with some numbers afterwards, to assist anyone finding your email address and saving them from agonising over who "CoolPerson3487@aol.com" is. (Sidenote - anyone using AOL is not cool). Type your name the same every time - Firstname Lastname - with the capitals at the beginning, and maybe put in a middle initial if you need to. Leave out the "cutesy" nicknames on your online profiles - use your real name - and use the same variant on it each time. If you are known as Sam, be Sam, but don't sign up to one service as Samantha, Samuel, Sammy, or Samtasticsammo143 just to mix it up.

Alternatively, we could just go back to old school address books. You know, the ones on paper, with a nice leather binding, and a pen helpfully attached to the side. The kind that has the aura of being lovingly used (and abused), shown by the occasional line through an old phone number, or a blob of Tipp-Ex correcting that 01832 area code that should have been 01823 from the very beginning, even though you only noticed it last Summer, but by that time had written someone else's details underneath, so close that scrubbing a line through the error and writing the correct digits just below would not be possible even to the smallest midget with the tiniest biro.

Yes, there is a cost to the amount of information we have at our fingertips - and the cost is not borne by the implements that store it, but by us, the humans, the same humans who cause the cost with our flagrant disregard for keeping it simple.