The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged Mobile Internet
ZTE Cocktail
12 years ago
Today I bought an HSDPA modem (ZTE MF628) designed by Moods of Norway. Three designs are available, and I chose ZTE Cocktail with blue tractors and pink cocktails (I guess that is how they party on Voss?). Who said that modems all should have the same horrible design? The three design got launched during the Oslo Fashion Week back in February this year.
The modem is made by ZTE Corporation, an unknown company for us living in Norway, but it is China’s largest listed telecommunications manufacturer and wireless solutions provider. It can do downloads up to 7,2 Mbps.
The installation of the modem’s straight forward as long as you install it for Windows XP/Vista. I didn’t manage to install it for Windows 7. It also comes with drivers for MacOS X, and it also reported to work with Linux (Ubuntu). The coolness dropped a little bit, when I saw the horrible user interface that came with the application that establishes the Internet connection. Fact is, I have never seen a good design for this simple kind of application. Mobile Connect looked ok, launch2net did not! I haven’t used the modem a lot, but it seems to be of a good quality. The modem also come with the possibility to read/write to Mini-SD card. Nice for people having digital compact camera with that kind of card reader.
Hopefully a future version of the modem’s driver, let you do the dial up directly from Windows 7, without these funny/horrible looking 3rd party applications.
A travel with HSDPA
13 years ago
Last week I was helping my parents to move from Flekkefjord to Oslo. My father landed on Gardemoen on Wednesday eve, and we traveled down to Flekkefjord with train the following morning. I had planned to work a little bit on the train over a mobile connection. Something that seemed to be more or less impossible.
First of all, the USB dongle seemed to loose connection as soon as you more or less moved. I had to reconnect several times, and some times that wasn’t enough, the software (Mobile Connect) needed to be restarted. I even experienced the software to crash and then not willing to start again, until the machine was restarted. Just as big a problem was the quality of the connection. Soon after Oslo, HSDPA was reduced to UMTS, and after Kongsberg to Edge. Long distances was as low as GPRS.
In the evening I was sitting with my laptop in the kitchen home in Flekkefjord, trying to answer some mails from colleagues at work. I was surprised, Netcom’s net in Flekkefjord was already upgraded to HSDPA. It was rock solid and a great alternative to traditional broadband at home. The following morning we started early driving to back to Oslo with car. The mobile experience was far better then on the train. As a passenger in a car, I had far better mobile connection and was able to work.
I don’t find this acceptable, why should business travelers consider train as a way of traveling? Shouldn’t train have been the perfect place to work? I used to pay extra for an office seat on the trains, to get power for my laptop and to get free access to newspapers. But isn’t what people that upgrade to office seat really want, Internet connection to be able to write e-mails and access corporate databases? Well, I have had my last travel to Flekkefjord, I guess …