philippe::niquille | regular niche market thoughts

So now I spent a few days with 24/7 connectivity everywhere I went. How did I like it? Read on.

Our university campus in St.Gallen mainly has poor connectivity. At the best you get around two out of six possible link quality marks (connected trough EDGE). Surfing does seem quite slow then. But it’s quite nice to still be connected at poor quality when everybody else has problems connecting to our campus wlan :-).

I was amazed to have only one connection drop while driving from St.Gallen to Zurich on the highway. The card switched between UMTS and EDGE seamlessly. I wondered where HSDPA went because could not even discover it in Zurich..

Now beeing out in the swiss backcountry I get four out of six signal strength marks. Surfing feels quite smooth and downloads vary between 2KB - 16KB/s. I did a lot of ssh stuff and working on the command was only interrupted by a few delays. Getting the connection to work seemed impossible at first. After calling the hotline the connection did work, but I learned that HSDPA is not yet available (although they advertise it) and that the supplied “unlimited manager” is partly crap. So far so good.
The cards power consumtion doesn’t feel to bad either. But I’ll try to get some more technical details as well :-).