3 pay as you go dongle

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ITH

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Has anyone used this for internet access across the Med; have you found it good value?

Until now we have used our mobile (Vodaphone) as a modem to connect to the web for e-mails and weather info (including grib files); but this has been very costly. And since we are often 'between countries' I don't fancy the local country SIM card route.

The product blurb says; "Packages available:1GB (£10) enables you to:- Send 650 plain text emails- Surf the web for 30 hours."
 
Yes I have one ( purchased a £5 / month 3gb contract with free USB modem when we purchased a mobile phone contract for my daughter )

Have tried to use it on 4 or 5 occasions across Europe. 1st trip would not even connect to network. I had not phoned them to tell them I wanted international roaming. Perhaps my fault but then I had spent 20 mins telling the bloke in the shop that that is what I wanted it for.

Subsequent trips. France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany - Found network but would not let me in without a password and log on ID. Chaps at 3 store have no clue what that is about. Had I tried manual network selection? Yes but since there is no indication of which network to use in which country its a bit hit and miss, never did get logged on! ( In italy it is a 3 network but even that wouldn't connect )

Last trip same again with the addition that in Greece i never could find a 3g network - at all!

Am sitting here at the moment in East Sussex, no signal what so ever and we are on top of a reasonably high part of the county.

Commuting to London gets about 3 small 5 min windows in an hours commute.

Oh, by the way , charges for bandwidth in the UK do not cover European downloads, £1 / mb in most locations. £3 in Greece. Vodafone charges up to £7 / mb.

Don't waste your money!

I have found that Europe has plenty of A/ internet cafe's B/ Unsecured and Unencrypted wireless networks C/ free hotel networks and D/ PAYG wireless access.

<edit> The Vodafone store in Preveza reckons that mobile broadband is only available on contract in Greece - no PAYG services anyway so buying a local PAYG sim wont work. ( have yet to confirm )
 
Ian, thanks for a detailed reply. How the glossy claims of manufacturers evaporate in the light of practical experience!

Your point about UK bandwidth charges not covering European downloads is particularly apt: we had been using our UK (Vodafone) mobile as a modem, and Vodafone charges were humungus.
 
Vodafone have a Euro Travel plan with their 3G dongle which allows 200MB/month in Europe & £4.25/MB after this. It's not cheap at £60/month but does work well from Spain to Italy which is where i cruise.
 
Worked brilliantly for me PAYG in the UK over Christmas but beware that you can only select £10, £15 and £25 topups for credit to your data account. I was badly mislead by the Carphone Warehouse man who was either a liar or ignorant (sadly, I suspect that he was lying). Having put your £25 voucher code in you select the 7MB option from the drop down menu and then it will be credited as a data account. Otherwise you pay £1 per MB or something outrageous. Once up and running, I had a brilliant service. Downloaded newspapers, Skype barely passable but just usable.
 
We used 3 PAYG widely in Sardinia during 2008. £10 per 1GB per month. Only very rarely did we not get a good connection.

However.............. 3 only have networks in UK and Italy and the £10 per GB rate thus only applies in UK and Italy.

For other countries, eg France, Spain and Greece you will pick up a roaming connection and the charges are frightening! Can't remember exactly, but somewhere in the region of £2-3 per MB.
 
I use the 3G whilst in UK, Infact i'm using it now. tried it in Spain and got nothing. However i'm a bit of a numbo with these things and later learnt that I probably did not have roaming set up. I think NIMBUSGB has given great advice all I can confirm is that it works. But a bit of a B***** to top up.
 
[ QUOTE ]

<edit> The Vodafone store in Preveza reckons that mobile broadband is only available on contract in Greece - no PAYG services anyway so buying a local PAYG sim wont work. ( have yet to confirm )

[/ QUOTE ]
Wind has mobile broadband on prepaid but at the moment it is to expensive to actually use.
 
Although at Euro5 for 48 hours in Greece the Wind PAYG service is useful and affordable for the occasions you can't find a wireless connection or internet cafe. They also do a deal for Euro 3.50 which allows you to connect on GPRS via a standard mobile phone, which is great, although admittedly somewhat slow, for checking email and weather (note this didn't work for me using a smartphone, which rapidly gobbled up all my credit).
 
The 3.49 a month was a great deal and I used it to connect with my laptop. They did not try to verify if you connected from your phone or laptop. In October they changed it and it is now limited to 40 MB a month. After that you have to pay extra per KB and it gets really expensive real quick /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif
 
Looked at using 3, but desperately limited coverage in Med, with only Italy being in their associate coverage, where I've found TIM better in terms of coverage and cost.

Their offers in the UK only look good when compared with all the other providers, who are trying to gouge the end-user.

I use my mobile phone (a Nokia 5200 for €109) with local PAYG SIMs - TIM has good swap arrangements in N Africa and Adriatic countries.

The older GPRS is pretty widely available throughout Europe and highly competitively priced, more modern EDGE is relatively widespread and HDSPA very infrequent.

For that reason I rejected 3 network
 
I too was misled by the Carphone Warehouse chap, as he told me that 1Gb would give me about 20 minutes surf time- I thought that was unlikely but on the strength of that bought the 12Gb package costing another £30.

I reckon it was ignorance and bullsh***ing rather than deliberate deception.
 
3 was fantastic in the UK when I first got it about a year ago.

recently I have noticed much stronger HDSPA signals and occasional 3.5 mb speeds , but most of the time speeds are down to 200-300 kb as a poor signal 3g takes over from the HDSPA which is still available and will crop up again if you are lucky(stationary unit).

I think too many subscribers use too much HDSPA so you are dropped down to 3g service that is slow to useless.

A year ago I rated the uk service as 9 out of 10
Now I rate it as 2 out of 10

can be fast on very rare occasions but it is unreliable.
 
3 was brilliant over this Christmas, between Shere and Farley Green, in Surrey. It must presumably be a regional thing? Maybe there are not so many 3 data users around there? Just occasionally it went very slow. The signal only ever showed two or three pips on their software, that is right at the bottom of the scale, but it was showing HDSPA most of the time.
 
I have used a dongle From Telia (Swedish national phone co) for four weeks from my house. I pay Telia £25 a month with no contract or binding time. I have to give three month notice to cancel. The dongle is a Huawei E220.

From my house I pick up EDGE. It is too slow for video but OK for Iplayer radio 4. Loading web pages is slow but because I can stay on-line 24/7 it is a vast improvement on my previous land line dial-up.

There is a coloured led on the dongle to indicate whether I am using EDGE 150 kb/s, 3G 150 kb/s, Turbo3G 1.4 Mb/s or WLAN 8 Mb/s. All same price. Speed is dropped if over 5GB per month for the rest of the month.

I am very impressed with the service up to now mainly because of the 24/7 thing.

I can use it outside Sweden but more expensive (of course). Wouldn't it be great if the EU handed something back to the citizens with an EU wide tarif from an EU wide provider?
 
Bought a 3.co.uk dongle, unlocked from e-bay on reccomendation from this forum. Currently using in Portugal with a Vodafone PAYG sim. Works a treat. At least with the unlocked dongle you can purchase a local PAYG sim with the best coverage for the area you require
 
I've looked on Ebay for the unlocked dongles and as yet not found a supplier.

Could you or anyone else please advise me of a supplier or item number, any help would be apppreciated. PM's ok /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif
 
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