Following my recent debacle with Tiscali/TalkTalk leaving me without broadband (possibly for 2-3 weeks) as of late last night, I did my "boy scout" bit in being prepared for the cut-off, which has proved surprisingly successful!..........
We live in an utterly atrocious reception area for nearly everything, particularly "mobile" signal, some, like Orange don't work at all, some minimally (T-Mobile and Vodaphone), so without much hope, decided that I'd try a "dongle"..... I'd decided to go for the cheapest I could find locally in the vain hope "it might work" - PC World have a t-mobile dongle, including £10 worth of top up for just over £18, so I ordered one "to collect", and carried on surfing.......then for some reason I found myself looking at the "3" website, so absent mindedly shovelled postcode and address into coverage finder, and it claimed their dongles would work here (whereas all the others put us firmly in the "snowballs in hell" category)........... So I changed the purchase, and ended up with a "3" dongle for £20 plus a tenner's top up - then spent a highly depressing afternoon and evening yesterday refettling two aged windoze laptops ("3 dongles" don't officially support Linux), updating all the software you need with 'doze, like antivirus and firewalls and by the time the connection to broadband failed last night was getting a connection on either of two highly flakey, and "a snail looks scorchingly fast in comparison" laptops. I also 'phoned the "3" helpline and asked for the connection details to use with linux (which they were very happy to give me, and were charmingly polite as only Indian call centres at their best can be), and fed them into my "main" Ubuntu desktop - with the short supplied connection lead supplied, I couldn't get the dongle close to a window, and Linux "didn't want to know"....... So I shrugged my shoulders, and resigned myself to the hair shirt and ashes of Windoze and snail's pace.........
This morning bought a 2m USB extension cable and attached it to dongle, Ubuntu desktop machine, and taped dongle to window - old faithful Ubuntu sniffed out the connection, and fired up - we have connection, by dongle, from a computer with a real operating system!
VERY happy bunny - although it's only showing "one bar" of signal strength it's working a treat, and for simple things like the forum, and collecting and sending email it isn't visibly a lot slower than broadband. I've used it quite a lot getting it up and running, and so far have only managed to use 2.5 mb of a 1gig tenners' worth......So with luck,if I'm careful, it should tide me over the "gap".
SO, should anyone else find themselves broadbandless (I doubt I'll be the only one), in my experience, a dongle is a worthwhile stopgap (even in the wilds)
