Have finally persuaded someone at a 3UK store to sell me a prepaid SIM card, topped up, and set up the self-care account. Speaking of which, why do you need to provision yourself a password via SMS, rather than just printing one on the SIM holder with your number? The whole process naturally involves putting the card into your phone, and taking it out because you didn’t realise they need the last 6 digits from the back of the SIM, and then putting it back in a phone, so you can take it out and put it into your modem. Then it’s just a small job to convert your talk’n’text balance into a 30 day data pack, and you’re in business. Easy!
So I’m now up and running with my splendid USB modem whizzing along on my train at speeds in excess of, well, half a French train’s speed, and eliminating the few remaining cells in my inner ear with some Aphex Twin.
But here’s the rub.
How come these modems have a splendid button to press on the screen labelled “Connect”, but never one that says “Connect and bloody well stay connected, as even my dial-up model could automatically reconnect when it lost contact with the cyberworld”?
HSDPA = Has Some Dropped Packet Annoyances
Still, it’s better than the National Express Wi-Fi that insists on randomly replacing the content of your browser tabs with the same annoying splash screen every 20 minutes (which is about how long it takes to load a page anyway).
Posted by Martin Geddes at 07:35 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/924.
Hey, if you use wvdial to control it under linux this doesn't have to be a problem.
Posted by: at September 24, 2008 10:20 AM