I've always been a little wary of offers of Internet access via mobile phone, performance always seems to be a little dubious and the bill is something you'd rather see on TV as a component of our national debt.

However, after seeing Vodafone's recent "3G Broadband" offer the temptation was just too much, so off went the order. It did take a little while to arrive (2 weeks!) and it did come with a scary manual that pretty much said "don't even think about plugging it in until you've installed the Windows software". The bit about how to get the service running with a real Operating System seemed to be missing .. strange but I guess predictable.

So, manuals and CD straight into the bin, plug in the card, what's next ...

There are lots of nice "howto's" on the PHARScape.org website so I won't duplicate them here, needless to say it took a bit of fiddling, but I now have a fairly reliable broadband service running over a Vodafone wireless link using Ubuntu 7.04 Linux.

I wonder how many people are looking at the Vodafone product, which is essentially £25 per month for unlimited usage and in theory works at up to 1.4Mbps, and *not* buying it because it  doesn't look like it would run on their [linux] laptop ?! I know it's not just me because I've been asked many times for a solution in the past and have had to say "not unless you own a small country" .. can't help thinking that Vadafone are missing a trick by not paying a few part-time tekkies to answer support queries on a forum .. hell Ubuntu alone reckon they have 18 million users out there. There must be a reasonable percentage with laptops saying "if only I could be sure I could get it to work".

Installation and Performance

I had to tweak a few things in order for the machine to see the card (these were relatively trivial) and after that you need to set up a PPP session in /etc/ppp/peers and an associated chat script in /etc/chatscripts. If you pick up the examples from the PHARScape.org site, these are a pretty good starting point.

Once you've got a connection you'll find that Vodafone kindly omit to send out information about DNS servers that you can use. As a result you'll have a working PPP connection, but no dns resolution.

There is a fairly easy solution to this (albeit not a 'proper' solution) which is to use opendns, so right click on your network icon in the tool tray and manually set the dns servers to;

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Then make sure your PPP config file in /etc/ppp/peers does NOT have usepeerdns in it. This solution seems to work well for me and flies quite happily via whichever network interface I seem to have connected at any given point in time.

In terms of speed it looks like I'm right on the edge of the network, indeed I don't get a great Orange signal and the strength indicator on the card reads 9,99 , which I'm guessing is only one bar from a possible 10 .. so a very weak signal.

Running speedtests from Speedtest.Net, I can get mixed results depending on which host I measure against. Typically I'm getting 350/360 kbps, which I guess is a reasonable GPRS connection. I've yet to see the fames 1.4Mbps, but then I guess I'll have to wait until I can use the laptop somewhere with better coverage.

For what it's worth, NX is fairly usable over GPRS.

I've noticed that occasionally my connection light goes red and everything stops, I don't know if this is the card completely losing signal or dopping back to from GRPS to 64k. I guess I'll get a better idea once I've traveled around with it a little.

So, come on Vodafone, what about a little support, it might even make you some more money! (and if anyone knows the answer to the missing DNS servers mystery ... )