[ILUG] Mobile Broadband under Linux

[Michael Watterson]

James McBoyle wrote:
> On 07/04/2008, Rory Browne <rbmlist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>>  My family in Mayo use the vodafone dongle at the minute, and it works
>>  fine in some parts of the house, and not so well in other parts.
>>
>>  The main problem is that vodafone are quite stingy in their bandwidth
>>  allowance, and they only allow you 5G per month. If an external
>>  antenna were possible we might be able to use a different mobile
>>  provider ( failing any sort of real broadband ).
>>     
>
> 3 do a usb dongle at a reasonable price, and they have a 10GB limit,
> which I find to be fairly reasonable for normal useage.
>   
can we stop calling it USB Broadband?
It doesn't need USB and isn't Broadband.
(Ethernet, WiFi, PCMCIA, MiniPCI, PCIe and expressCard options for 
GPRS/EDGE/3G/HSDPA exist).

ALL 3G /HSDPA technology is only the UpTo speed with one user and good 
signal. With economic 50% sector load, the speed per user can be 150kbps 
and even for a few users the ping is 150 typical. With a full sector the 
ping rises to over 1000ms.

The OECD, EU etc does not call Mobile 3G/HSDPA "Broadband".

it's comparable or better to dual Channel ISDN (worse latency) so is 
Narrow or Mid Band. But maybe you just want a flat rate mostly faster 
than Dialup Internet rather than Real Broadband.

EDGE (O2 fall back from HSDPA/3G) on GSM is about 220K (lightly loaded). 
3G lightly loaded 340k and HSDPA 70k to 3600 depending on loading.

3 has only 3G/HSDPA. Vodaphone GPRS on GSM (60k ish) or 3G/HSDPA, O2 has 
GPRS/EDGE on GSM and 3G/HSDPA on 3G

Also GSM is 900 or 1800 MHz. (O2 mostly 900MHz, Meteor mostly 1800 MHz, 
but all GSM have both) and 3G is 2100MHz only.

Lower frequency gets in buildings, round buildings & trees & Hills better.

Satellite is about 800ms Latency at best and about €99, so typically 
twice 3G/HSDPA price, and similar typical speed for cheapest package, 
but less degradation of speed (512k package rarely below 250K and 1M 
rarely below 500k).

The main advantage of Edge/3G/HSDPA is flat rate mobility. It's not 
comparable to any real Broadband package and should not be in Irish BB 
penetration statistics. neither should Satellite (latency too high) nor 
Ripwave/clearwire (Nomadic solutions comparable to x2 ISDN dual channel 
speed with poor latency).

P.S. I work for a non-MobilePhone ISP, so some may feel free to disagree 
with my analysis.


-- 
Mike