I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Coming up to the end of a quick week in the UK and I’ve been living on 3G.
Our team in the UK are on a £25 5GB per month plan which they use at home as well as work. This seems to be enough for heavy road warrior use.
3G does not feel as fast as wifi, it’s just slightly sluggish but quite acceptable. The big benefit is that it is ubiquitous. On the train, any cafe, you’re connected. It’s fast enough for demos.
The price, 5GB of data and ubiquity is such that you just use it without thinking. That’s how it should be.
The new devices are just small USB sticks. I assume they’ll be embedded like wifi next year.
Good to see that Voda NZ is going wide with 3G so that it will be available all over New Zealand.
Vodafone commits to $500 million mobile investment
Ubiquity is key (as well as reasonable price/data caps of course).
Berg Insight reports the number of mobile broadband enabled PC laptops is set to rise to almost 50 million by 2013 so mobile broadband is a huge enabler for SaaS offerings.
As I’ve been traveling for the past week I’m on email, Xero (of course), so able to stay on top of teh admin. You can be completely connected to the information you need while out growing the business.
So I’m really looking forward to 3G arriving in NZ. It really does transform the way you work.
blog
I have 3G embedded in my OQO E2, which is VERY portable (more than the Air…;-) ), meaning that I have high-speed access virtually anywhere.
To be honest, 3G beats Wi-Fi in many locations, especially REALLY slow hotels. Nicer still is Vodafone have introduced a per-day rate for 3G roaming in Europe, which has dramatically brought our costs down and changed the way we work.
Also, Vodafone has a SmartExpress card now that fits the MacBook Pro.
I would agree with Rod in that 3G seems slower than most WiFi. I don’t always use my Voda 3G in London because the hotel I stay in has poor 3G access, it is mostly GPRS. Of course they charge GBP15 a day but its good speed. I would use the BT or Cloud service but their reception is poor there to.
Staying in a hotel in Paris where wiFI is very fast and FREE.
My only experience of WiFi inNZ is connected to a router at home to ADSL; and this frankly is very poor compared to WiFi in a hotel where I would doubt they use ADSL.
No notebook have 14.4mbps access with the built-in aerial etc according to Voda UK. You need to use the pebble as displayed.
3G arrived in New Zealand when Telecom NZ released CDMA 1xEVDO. It is more reliable than Vodafone’s current deployment, with a bigger coverage - yes, you can have 3G a few kms out of Martinborough in a farm.
It falls back to CDMA 1xRTT which is roughly the same speed of EDGE so you should be ok.
Vodafone launched 3G a couple of years ago. It is not launching now. What they are doing is correcting the mistakes. Making it available in more places. Making it available in different bands so that you can actually use it - but the new band is not coming to the big centres, which may mean you still be plagued with the crap coverage in Wellington and Auckland, unless they deploy more sites and make sure the bandwidth available is actually available.
Time will tell. At the moment I am using 100% Telecom - and had the best 3G experience while in the US. Just used a Telecom SIM card and great speeds. Shame about their data roaming rates (as well as Vodafone’s). At $10 per megabyte you can really only do the basics before you find a wifi-enabled cafe…
@Mauricio, that’s rubbish. It’s TELECOM that is correcting its big mistake - backing the wrong technology. Telecom’s building a whole new cellphone network yet again. AMPS, D-AMPS, CDMA, CDMA1xRTT and now GSM.
Telecom’s also screwing it up again. Who builds an EDGE network in 2008? And Telecom’s exciting new world of 3G GSM extends to the edges… of the CBDs of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. What’s that all about??
Vodafone’s doing the right thing - using 900MHz to extend the reach of its 3G network. The only real issue is whether the next version of the iPhone will roam on 900 and the answer is probably yes. Either way it doesn’t matter. I’d rather have Vodafone’s 3G to the edges of the country than Telecom’s 3G to the edges of the CBD.
Crazy Vodafone iPhone prices - still pay $199 to buy on 250 per month for 2 years ($6,000) in total. Would there be a minor margin in this for Vodafone??
Crazy Vodafone iPhone prices - still pay $199 to buy on 250 per month for 2 years ($6,000) in total. Would there be a minor margin in this for Vodafone??
Vodafone NZ 900mhz 3G network is well underway. I have a Nokia 6121c and have 3G in many places now. Even was up Shelley beach (North of Helensville) in the middle of nowhere and had full 3G coverage
@ Mauricio…….
Instead of spouting off here about Telecom, perhaps a bit more research, based on fact than fiction would be helpful? Vodafone’s 3G coverage/speed leaves Telecom’s for dead, especially with Vodafone’s new 900Mhz Network rollout. I see you have written on your Soap Box forums - Geekzone - about Vodafone not having enough backhaul bandwidth, well obviously you have very little knowledge knowledge, with a comment about like that.
& lol your comments about Vodafone fixing it’s mistakes, since when did Telecom ever make a correct one? They stuffed up when they introduced a technology of which at the time only 10% of the world’s network providers were using, now it’s even less. Furthermore, since when did Vodafone stop launching 3G deployment? Last I heard new 900Mhz & 2100Mhz Cellsites were popping up like Wild Flowers around New Zealand, where Telecom have no 3G coverage at all!
You should know better than to make false claims MF.
@ Mauricio, I find your total lack of knowledge on Vodafone’s Network capabilities laughable.
@ Mauricio, I find your total lack of knowledge on Vodafone’s Network capabilities laughable. Next time you post, please base your comments on fact.
Now Ararimu
@Grant Smith (aka Grantis, aka Zimsar10, aka Harold): I see you found somewhere else to troll after being banned from Geekzone.
Here is the fact you missed: the 7.2 Mbps service you say Vodafone offer that is so much faster than Telecom *is not live*. So far only Albany Nth has a test site. This is planned to go live next week, in waves.
Before you post things you don’t know, and before saying I don’t know - test your knowledge.
@Jojo Telecom is not correct mistakes. Is changing courses. At th time they decided on CDMA instead of GSM they didn’t have the bands needed. And GSM wasn’t the dominant standard back then.
Telecom deployment of CDMA is quite good. There is a huge CDMA market ine th U.S. and Korea, but our local market (and its 50% mobile share) is not good enough to allow scale to get the best handsets - Sprint and Verizon buy by the hundreds of thousands of millions, Telecom can’t do it.
Telecom’s decision to go GSM/EDGE and WCDMA is also an economical one in terms of revenue. People in the U.S. with a passport go to Europe more frequently, so they are more likely to have GSM handsets. Telecom is losing millions in roaming revenues that go to Vodafone. This gotta make money.
Back to GSM and CDMA. If you look at evolution, CDMA 1xEV-DO will eventually turn into LTE, after CDMA 1xEV-DO Rev C. Hey, isn’t this the same LTE that GSM operators are going to use? Yes, it is.
Telecom won’t go to LTE through CDMA, but Verizon and Sprint will.
At the end it will all be the same, so why fight who is right now?
The growth of gsm over cdma was massive when the cdma network was been rolled out in nz. Cdma is good technology but its the old vhs and beta saga. Cdma was a mistake for telecom.
@ Mauricio
Telcom backed the wrong horse when they went with CDMA & for your information GSM was far more prolific than CDMA, when Telecom choose to back the wrong horse & all indications at a market level indicated that GSM would be the preferred technology, not CDMA.
For someone who banned me for being a “troll” YOU are doing nothing more than trolling your Telecom support banner on these forums, when everyone knows that Telecom are way behind with both their speeds, their technology & now their coverage, especially with Vodafone’s new 900Mhz Network.
Please stop trying to defend the undefendable & admit that Vodafone are better than your chosen provider, or is that too hard for you to swallow?
Let it go Mauricio, there is a bridge out there somewhere………..
“Telcom backed the wrong horse when they went with CDMA & for your information GSM was far more prolific than CDMA, when Telecom choose to back the wrong horse & all indications at a market level indicated that GSM would be the preferred technology, not CDMA.”
This is pretty irrevelant. Telecom had no choice but to deploy CDMA, GSM was not an option. Why? Because they didn’t own any spectrum to deploy a viable GSM network. The evolution path with virtually all AMPS/DAMPS operators was to deploy CDMA, Telecom chose this path because it was the logical decision to make. 850 GSM was not an option at this stage and rolling out a 1800MHz or 1900MHz GSM network would have made no sence as it would have required a capital investment that simply made no sence. This left Telecom with one choice - CDMA. Had they waited for the GSM 850 standard to be developed and rolled out parallel AMPS/DAMPS + GSM networks Telecom would have had no customers left as they would have all moved to Vodafone who had a far superior network.
I’d argue that Telecom made the right decision and are still making the right decisions today. Their only fatal mistake was opting to give up an ETACS band in preference for the AMPS B band in the early 90’s. Had Telecom kept the ETACS spectrum they could have deployed a GSM network in the mid 90’s when it became obvious that GSM was going to be the dominatant mobile standard. Had Telecom deployed GSM instead of CDMA I’d argue that their market share would be similair to what it is now. Technology isn’t necessarily the key factor when it comes to running a business.
Telecom didn’t give up ETACS - they were required to by the Government. Swapped it for AMPS B. That spectrum was bought for only $5k as well - sigh