Last year I received a call out of the blue from my current cell phone provider (Three UK), with an existing customer only offer of half-price mobile broadband. For £5.00 a month I’d get 1GB inclusive transfer each month, and a free USB modem, for the life of both contracts. Excellent!

What turned out to be not so excellent, was the speed. How they can call this ‘broadband’ and get away with it is beyond me. Since the day I got it, it’s been next to useless. It doesn’t matter where I go, be it with my laptop or plugged into my home computer, it is virtually unusable. So it went in the drawer for 12 months, forgotten about. I’m still paying for it, but it’s next to useless and as I’m tied in for 18 months there was little I could do about it.

I found it again today and wondered – has it improved?

I plugged it in and headed over to SpeedTest.net. 20 minutes later (yes, 20, that isn’t a typo), the website had loaded! I clicked Begin Test, and went and had some lunch. This was going to take a while.

Shocking. And the best part is, I’m in a “Good” mobile broadband coverage area! Oh well, at least my monthly bill has gone down to £4.90 thanks to the VAT cut… Avoid 3 like the plague folks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Geek, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.