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Dave Berkeley wrote: > Looks like I might have to make the journey from Plymouth to London (via > Westbury) on a regular basis. I'll need some connectivity on the journey. > > I know there was some discussion about the Huawei E220 USB Modem a while ago. > Does anyone have any recommendations / warnings on a suitable Linux friendly > mobile broadband service that gives good coverage on this route? > > Low running costs, and short contract are a priority too. Three Mobile broadband on Pay As You Go is pretty reasonable if you don't need mega amounts of bandwidth, prices start from £10 which would give you 1GB allowance which lasts for 30 days/until you're allowance is up (if you use the allowance within the 30 days you can top up again). Modems start at about £50 for the Huawei E220 but they do smaller USB pen drive size modems (not sure if they work though). The advantage of Three is that if you can't get a 3G/HSDPA signal you go down to GPRS and GSM speeds so you should have coverage for most if not all of the journey (I don't do this journey so I'm not exactly sure where and where isn't covered). You do have about 3 days to return the modem if it turns out not to work (it's in the instructions, and I'm sure the Three Store staff could advise). > > I'll be using it with a ThinkPad running Ubuntu. So I suppose I could use a > cardbus card instead of USB. > If you can find a 3G cardbus modem cheap enough then that would probably work too, all you would need is a SIM card then (IIRC you'd have to call Three to get them to turn on the mobile broadband in this case). There are other options available such as Vodafone and T-Mobile which I think are fairly comparable in price but I'm not sure if they do it on PAYG and I'm not sure what their connection is like because I haven't used them for mobile data. Hope this helps a bit anyway. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html