MiFi?

[Dave2002]

Does anyone have experience of mobile internet, such as MiFi? I used to have, and occasionally use, 3G USB dongles, but service was always a bit iffy. I think I ended up with three dongles, for 3, BT and Vodafone. None were particularly good, and trial and error was needed to find hotspots. The MiFi idea has a modest attraction, though 3 seems to be the major network provider. My experience of 3 is that it gives quite good value for money, providing the service works where one wants it.

I don't know whethe it's possible to change to cheaper providers, such as Tesco Mobile or Giff Gaff, having purchased a MiFi unit.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

We have an orange mobile internet plug-in for the iPad. The problem is that the battery needs recharging frequently.

[Dave2002]

We have an orange mobile internet plug-in for the iPad. The problem is that the battery needs recharging frequently.

That's helpful information. I might try one of these anyway, for several of us to share. I note that the cost of a 12 Gbyte SIM card from 3 is less than 12 months service with a 1 Gbyte/month download allowance - so could save money, and be convenient for travelling. Seems that Vodafone and O2 also have these, though with different names. O2 is called Pocket Hotspot, while Vodafone is using an R206 and costs £35 for the device with 2Gbyte loaded. I don't believe in monthly plans - I like to limit what gets spent - wherever possible. I'm not sure which, if any, give significantly better coverage. I don't think any are seriously doing 4G yet.

[Dave2002]

As it happens one of these - a Huawei E5220 from 3 - recently turned out to be very useful. Our trip was to northern wilds, and we were staying in a lodge. There was no wi-fi, and despite what it said in the brochure, there was no 3G either. I wasn't expecting the Huawei device to become so useful so quickly - but for our purposes it was essential. At first it looked as though even this device was challenged, as all that appeared was a solid red indicator - not the green indicator I expected. On walking around though I discovered that the red colour changed a bit - it was hard to see because of the sunlight - but it became more orange or yellowish. Nowhere did it become green.

The next step was to see if we could connect to it from inside the house, and this turned out to be possible. Finally we put the unit in the front by the windscreen of our hire car, parked in a convenient location not far from the house, and with that configuration it "glowed" slightly orange and we could just about use the internet, though the battery usually ran down in about 4-6 hours, so we had to keep running out to fetch it back and recharge it.

Really this was a pain - but as the alternative was to have no internet at all it worked for us. Checking along the road there were patches of red, orange and green, but we could not spend all our time going as far as quarter of a mile in order to get a signal. A couple of our iPads were 3G enabled, but they could not pick up a signal from within the house, so the solution with using the wi-fi from the Huawei worked quite well.

We were somewhat saddened that the owners of the lodge clearly thought that it would only be occupied by holiday makers with no wish to connect to the rest of the world. In our case we were there for both business and pleasure, and getting our business sorted was essential - we would not have gone there if we had thought that this would have been so difficult.

Note also that although I could have resurrected one of our earlier dongles, because of the specific constraints of where we were staying, plus also the need for multiple device connection (we had up to 4), this would not have worked at all in that location.

[Flosshilde]

We were somewhat saddened that the owners of the lodge clearly thought that it would only be occupied by holiday makers with no wish to connect to the rest of the world.

Where does one begin?

[Dave2002]

A minor update to this thread - some MiFi units appear to use default IP addresses which may conflict with LAN IPs. I don't fully understand the behaviour which results, as if the only connections to a laptop are wireless, then a selection of choice of network should be done in advance, and one's device should ignore the unselected network, but I'm finding that with my Macbook Pro, that the presence of a nearby Vodafone MiFi unit results in a lot of 403 error messages in Firefox. Maybe I'm wrong, but it does seem to come from some conflict between the MiFi network and my home LAN.

Possibly there is a bug in the laptop software (OS X - Mountain Lion) which polls looking for active wireless devices to connect to.