15th December 2007

Internet access on the move

I have been asked on several occasions what I use for internet access on my travels – hence the reason for this page.

I looked at all of the mobile data packages on offer back in June of 2006. At that time (and I don’t believe anything has changed much) t-mobile appeared to be offering the best package as far as coverage, cost and data download allowance was concerned.

I started out by buying the t-mobile data card that from memory cost something in the region of £20 per month and provided up to 3GB of data download at 3g speeds per month. Tests on the boat with the card plugged into the laptop soon highlighted a major problem with reception inside the boat – it was very poor. I explained the situation to t-mobile and they agreed to swap the data card for a Nokia N70 phone and a package that gave me £30 worth of free calls/texts per month plus Web-n-Walk professional that gives me the 3GB of 3g download per month (flext-20 plan). This package cost me about £29 per month and works very well.

A few months after moving onto the boat it became apparent that the £30 worth of calls per month (150 minutes) was not enough to meet our phone needs so I upgraded the package to give us £60 worth of calls per month (300 minutes) at a total package cost of £35 per month (flext-25 plan).

This month (December 2007) is the last month of the 18 month agreement with t-mobile. T-mobile gave me the option of changing my phone or having a £10 per month reduction in my monthly bill for the same package. I opted for the £10 per month reduction as I am quite happy with the Nokia N70.

Note that there are two Web-n-Walk packages. There is the standard package that allows you to use your phone for things like email and web surfing. There is also a professional package that allows you to use your phone as a modem for connection to the internet. It is the professional package that is required.

I connect my phone to my laptop/PC via Bluetooth and it works very well. I can also connect the phone to the laptop/PC via a data cable but have not needed to do this as the Bluetooth connection works flawlessly.

In general, coverage has been very good around the parts of the country that we have travelled so far. Near larger towns we get good 3g reception. In more rural areas we only get GSM reception. One interesting problem that we get occasionally is that the phone shows good 3g signal reception but fails to make a data connection. I have found that the only way to get a connection when this happens is to set the phone to GSM mode only instead of automatic GSM/3g mode.

All in all, I am very happy with the package and have no plans to switch to any other provider. On the few occasions that I have contacted t-mobile technical support they have been very responsive and helpful. So far, I have never managed to break the 3GB per month data limit!!

Material Copyright © 2007 Ernie Williams
This page last modified on: 15 December, 2007 8:31 AM