Mobile Phone News:

Here we go, with part 2 of my mobile adventures in Wales, and as promised, here’s the tale of using mobile broadband over there in one of my favourite ever holiday destinations. I’d always planned to take a USB Modem with me, to find out how well it worked, and give you guys a bit more of an insight into it, but little did I know it would actually save my dad from getting drowned…

Let me explain.

With him being a keen fisherman, and with our holiday cottage being right in the middle of a sheep-field next to the beach, he was naturally going to spend a fair amount of time fishing. Like, at 5 in the morning, something I never could get my head round. And so, he needed to know tide times. We’d already planned the first week of the holiday, using a high-tide-times-websitey-thing, before we went away, but it only let us find those times out for a week in advance (which kinda shafted us for the second week).

Needless to say, the site used Flash (Murphy’s Law in action!), so none of us could check it out on our mobile phones.

Good job I’d snagged a ZTE USB Modem to test then, wasn’t it…

So, I plugged it in, as the sound of high-pitched baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’s reverberated round the cottage, and reflected on the fact that in hindsight, we’d picked a fortnight to go away when the lambs were just becoming most vocal. Still, at least the modem was installed and ready in seconds, otherwise I may have gone outside and shouted at them to shut up.

Down to the big question… did I get full-on, full-fat, HSDPA-powered mobile broadband in the cottage?

No.

Damn.

I did, however, get 3G, and granted, it wasn’t running at 2.8Mbps, but it was quite substantially faster than my mobile phone, and frankly, I was happy with it. The problem was that although there was a hilarious mast a few miles up the road (more on that in Friday’s blog post), there was a honkin’ great hill between us and it. Oh, and let’s not forget that the cottage we were in was a converted barn, and had walls roughly 14 and a half feet thick, which tends to kill any kind of wireless communication…

Here was the funny part, though; on a particularly sunny day, I thought I’d venture down towards the beach, and try it there, where there were no 14-foot thick walls to block the signal. It turns out I must’ve had an almost direct line of sight to the cell tower, then, because I got 5 bars of full HSDPA! In a Welsh sheep-field!

Now, that was awesome.

I did get attacked by a sheep, though.

And as for it saving my dad from drowning… well, ok, I may have overdramatised that a bit, since if he’d headed to the beach when it was high tide, he almost certainly would’ve turned back, rather than wading in and drowning. But hey, it could’ve happened!

Mobile broadband: it saves lives (or, at least, prevents wet feet).

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