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With a web-enabled smart phone or via a
small adapter – sometimes referred to as a
“Dongle” or “USB Key” – plugged into your
laptop, mobile broadband will allow you to
surf the web ‘anywhere’. In the park, in the
pub or on the train, this technology
promises to keep you connected all the time.
Companies such as O2 are offering Pay As You
Go dongles for only £14.67 with data
packages as cheap as £15 for 3GB of usage,
or as a Pay Monthly option at £9.97 for 3GB
per month. Whilst not being quite as cheap,
as fast, or as generous with their data
usage as ADSL, the prices are still coming
down and coverage is increasing.
But what are the realities of Internet
Access from a phone?
Unfortunately, surfing the web on a mobile
phone can be a painful experience. The
screens are too small, the devices are not
powerful enough and sites which use
technologies like Flash (which allows for
dynamic and rich content such as YouTube
videos) will rarely work.
Web navigation can also be awkward as web
pages are built to be browsed with a mouse
and keyboard, not a touch-screen or keypad.
Many popular websites such as Google and
Facebook have tailored versions of their
pages for mobile use, but these tend to be
heavily cut-down adaptations.
Most phones now provide interfaces for
accessing your email. There are various
approaches which provide different
facilities and the technology is steadily
evolving, but mobile email is generally
available and practical. Just being able to
see email you have received while out of the
office is incredibly useful for many people.
The phone interfaces can make long replies
hard work, but a quick reply, or a forward
to a colleague with some quick notes are
generally very practical. The main
difficulty comes if you need to open
documents which are delivered attachments.
Which document types (if any) you can open
and edit on your phone will vary between
models.
But what about 3G dongles?
3G dongles are small devices about the size
of memory stick, which plug into a free USB
port on your laptop allowing you to access
mobile broadband. Some manufactures are even
integrating 3G “dongles” into the laptop
chassis so all you need is a SIM Card. This is where this
technology really starts to make sense. With
the aid of a 3G dongle, laptops or netbooks
are now small enough and powerful enough to
be truly portable web surfing devices. Find
an area with good signal and day to day
surfing is a joy – pages load quickly,
YouTube content streams well and Flash-laden
pages will work as they should. This is true
‘mobile broadband’.
But (and there is always a ‘but’) in an area
with poor or no 3G signal your surfing will
grind to a near halt. Unlike a mobile phone
conversation, which can be held in
relatively low signal with only a small drop
in quality, 3G connections are very
susceptible to changes in signal strength.
This can cause problems if you are on a fast
moving train, or just indoors in a marginal
area.
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Disaster Recovery
The adaptors and contracts are now cheap
enough to be considered an ‘emergency
backup’ if you have no other means of
connecting to the Internet. Businesses are
now so dependent on the Web, that the loss
of connection can be a crippling experience.
For a relatively small outlay you can
purchase a pay as you go contract and
adaptor and have one computer back on the
Internet straight away. Some
re-configuration work will probably be
needed in order to access your email, but
this could be all you require until your
fixed line connection is restored. For
network access in an emergency, the latest
business class routers now include ports to
allow a 3G adaptor to share mobile broadband
to all network users.
Using 3G in this way is still highly
dependent upon the signal available and
without prior testing there is no way of
knowing whether your office has adequate
coverage. Delta Comtech can supply and test
such units for your office, and help prepare
your system for a smooth transition.
And finally
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