Mobile Broadband: The big roundup

Internet everywhere, for affordable prices. Dave Stevenson investigates the claims, tests the speeds and delivers a verdict on the best plan for your mobile dollars.

3G, or mobile broadband, to give it its friendlier moniker, is increasingly tempting. Most providers claim up to 99 per cent of the Australian population is covered by their 3G networks and at impressive, broadband-like speeds of up to 7.2Mb/s.

It’s hard to ignore the advantage of being able to take your connection with you when you leave home. No more downtime when you’re on the train to work, for instance. And, should your home broadband connection throw a strop, you can simply pop in your 3G card and carry on.

But what are the drawbacks? 3G connections can be expensive, and the small print could see you paying through the nose for extra bandwidth, or your connection throttled after a few gigabytes of data.

We’ve combed the small print of every major 3G provider to outline the best plans out there. We’ve also tested every major 3G modem. Not just for download speeds: we’ve tested upload speeds too. Our testing covered major metropolitan areas of Sydney where providers claim to have excellent coverage, letting us investigate best-case network speeds.

Of course, we haven’t just tested these cards: we’ve lived with them. We’ve browsed the internet, watched videos online, and treated them to the kind of intensive use the most dedicated internet addict would be proud of. We’ve tested the software supplied with each modem as well, evaluating how well it keeps you abreast of your bandwidth use and signal strength.

Finally, for those who want a more permanent solution, we’ve looked at three of the best 3G-ready 802.11g routers on the market. These are fully-fledged Wi-Fi routers with 3G capabilities – perfect for setting up wireless internet access anywhere and sharing it with others.

How we test - plus the ratings explained

3G modems

Some 3G providers advertise speeds as fast as 7.2Mb/s, which is impressive. But do these spectacular claims translate into lightning-fast internet access? The only way to find out is to test each network, whether with a PC card modem, USB modem or internet key. It’s not as simple as merely timing downloads – for applications such as photo sharing, VoIP and video conferencing, upload speeds are every bit as important as download speeds, so we’ve tested them as well.

For our testing, we’ve used www.speedtest.net, an excellent (and free) online broadband testing service. This allows you to choose a server near you and carry out upload, download and latency tests. To ensure accuracy we run each test ten times per device, then average the results.

Our tests are drawn from North Sydney, in which every provider claims excellent coverage, which gives us an indication of an ISP’s best-case performance. You should remember, though, that mobile coverage varies enormously in Australia: check each providers’ coverage claims before splashing out. See below for more.

We’ve also evaluated each device for its ease of setup, and the quality of its software bundle. Although data caps vary both in the quantity of data and the severity of the penalty metered out to anyone who goes over, we think everyone will want to keep an eye on their bandwidth use, so we award more points to modems that have easy to use and understand software. Remember though, that ISPs change their fees and network coverage frequently.

Coverage

Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of grand-sounding claims when it comes to coverage. Telstra, for instance, claims to have “Australia’s largest and fastest national mobile network”. It claims its network is “more than 100 times the size” of any of its competitors’, and covers 98.8 per cent of the Australian population. Telstra’s network is theoretically capable of speeds up to 7.2Mb/s. In practice, it says, you should see speeds up to 3Mb/s, bursting up to 6Mb/s in “some areas”.

Virgin is owned by Optus, and not surprisingly, the 3G network coverage claimed by the two companies is identical. Optus claims its network reaches 80 per cent of the population, but plans to cover 96 per cent by the end of the year –over 690,000 square miles of Australia. Its speed claims are a little less eye-popping than Telstra’s, but still respectable: it claims customers should expect speeds up to 1.5Mb/s. Keep in mind that Virgin currently offers a 3G service, while Optus offers a faster HSDPA service.

Vodafone says “our 3G broadband network covers metropolitan areas in Sydney, Central Coast, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast, Adelaide and Perth, plus all major international airports, and is constantly expanding.” It notes that its GPRS network covers 92 per cent “of the places people live and work in Australia”, but using GPRS for surfing the internet from a laptop remains a frustrating measure of last resort.

This Group Test appeared in the December, 2008 issue of PC & Tech Authority Magazine