At the hotel where we typically stay near HQ there is wired internet access provided by Swisscom. It’s a decent service, reasonably fast and reliable. However, at 15 Pounds Sterling (around $22 USD!) per 24-hour period it’s also very dear. To get around some of this cost one of my co-workers loaned me a company issued Vodaphone 3G USB dongle. This was the first time that I’d used one of these little gadgets.
Late in the evening UK time I would call home via the SIP URI that I setup for her soft phone. The experience of speaking at length via wideband over IP was dramatically better than using my cell phone to call home. In fact, I was surprised at the stability of the 3G wireless connection.
It wasn’t especially fast, or at least it didn’t measure very well at the hotel. A quick test over at http://www.speedtest.net showed to only make 300k/300k. I find that a little suspect since the Vodaphone login client showed me an FTP download happening at >800k.
I was most impressed when we made a day trip by car to a company near Reading. It was over two hours drive from Cambridge, around the M-25. I was able to work online, reading email and FTPing files even as we drove. The access speed along that route was very good indeed.
Later on, as I was on a call to home, I checked the Vodaphone client and it showed me using a steady 80k for each call leg, which is just what I expected when using G.722 over IP. Throughout the week that I was away we had little trouble with calls breaking up as long as I had reasonable 3G signal strength.
I did discover that I don’t especially like the AGC option in Eyebeam. When Stella would pause it ramped up her microphone level until I was getting a blast of TV audio. Then when she spoke again it clamped down hard. Even so, it was handy when she would get up from her desk and move around our den while speaking. In that situation it worked to maintain a constant audio level regardless of her position.
I wonder if anyone has ever built a conference room speakerphone into their home? I can imagine an IP6000 installed in the den, with extension microphones & speakers clandestinely hidden in each major room. Perhaps it could be integrated into the whole house audio system? Or would that be a little too much like Star Trek, where people walk around talking to the ships computer?
She was a little surprised when I took the opportunity one evening to VNC into her desktop PC and turn off the AGC feature, even as we were chatting. I have VPN connectivity back to our home network, which makes such tweaks easy to accomplish. It does occasionally leave here with the impression that there’s a “ghost in the machine.”
One of the things that I noticed about the Vodaphone 3G service was that they process images through some kind of media proxy in an effort to conserve wireless bandwidth. In looking at various web sites it appeared that JPEG, GIF and PNG images were on-the-fly transcoded to very low image quality, and even reduced in bit-depth.
The result was a kind of solarized appearance. This had no impact on text, but rendered some images quite ugly. It must soak up considerable hardware resource to process every image before transmission. I wonder if they would be better off putting their resources into enhancing overall network capacity?
So my initial experience with 3G wireless internet access was not bad. As someone who spends a considerable amount of time in hotels paying for internet access I may be able to make a case for adding a 3G USB dongle to my T-Mobile account. Even if it doesn’t work everywhere the $60/mo is about the same as just a few days access at a decent hotel. If it works reliably then it may even reduce the number of minutes that I need on my cell phone every month.
If such as device is available for GSM networks like T-Mobile’s then perhaps that’s the route I should choose. It might allow me to finally use the little Quickphones QA-342 SIP/Wifi handset, or at least share the 3G access between my laptop & netbook.