Review: T-Mobile Web 'n' Walk Stick
Review: T-Mobile Web 'n' Walk Stick
Five years ago, WiFi was just beginning to make a big impression on the laptop market. Add on cards in PCMCIA and USB form were fairly common place, then Intel’s Centrino technology made the wireless network de rigeur for notebooks and the wireless market exploded.
You can see a similar thing happening today with 3G data cards. They’ve been around for a while in various forms, starting off with chunky PCMCIA devices and price tariffs as hefty as the hardware. Now they’re smaller and offer reasonable price plans. Before too long it won’t be uncommon to find them built in as standard to most laptops, and then the technology will really take off, ushering in truly wireless internet wherever you might be with no need for routers or hotspots.
We thought we’d have a look at the state of play in the 3G web world of today by having a tinker with T-Mobile’s Web ‘n’ walk stick, a USB device that uses the network’s HSPDA service to deliver broadband while you’re out and about.
Prices have fallen since the old days of a Vodafone dominated market where if you wanted speedy net access on the move you had to pay through the nose for it. On a 24 month contract, the Web ‘n’ walk costs a reasonable £15 per month, which gives you 3 GB of downloads to play around with. There’s a few restrictions, like you are not permitted to use VoIP services unless you subscribe to the costlier package, but otherwise the package seems fair. 3 GB isn’t huge for normal use, but it’s unlikely many people would realistically even approach this limit with normal use – who’s going to be so desperate to download their dodgy movies that they just can’t wait until they’re home? In fact, unless you specifically need to use VoIP outside the home or office, there seems little need to go for the higher package at all, despite the vague and uninformative protestation on T-Mobile’s website that it offers the ‘Best value plan on the market today’.
The device itself is small, sleek and idiot proof (even for us) – pop your SIM card in, plug it into a USB port and it installs itself and the connection manager software that lets you monitor net speed and data downloads for daily, weekly and monthly periods. We were up and browsing within a few minutes, enjoying the wonders of the internet outside in the park on one of the few sunny days we can hope to get this summer.
Download speed was on the whole very good, although, inexplicably, quick visits to PC Pitstop informed us that upload speed was usually several times higher than downloads, getting up to around the 1 Mbps mark while downloads peaked at around 300 Kbps. A torrent fiend’s best friend perhaps. While odd, this asymmetry isn’t enough to be a practical nuisance, and general surfing and e-mailing was very nippy. The only drawback, which is to be expected of wide area wireless networks, is poor latency; ping times were generally around the 300 ms mark. In real world terms, this only produces a slight delay when clicking on links or opening new sites, which I would imagine is about as heavy duty as internet use would get on the move. Just in case though, because there’s always someone who wants to do something impractical, I’ll point out that this device would be unsuitable for latency reliant applications like gaming. Instant messaging might suffer a bit too, but you’d have to have some pretty high-speed conversations for it to become noticeable.
These minor drawbacks are just that: minor. It’s a sign of a good piece of kit when you can get on with your usual activities and forget that you’re trying out something new, and that’s just what we found with the Web ‘n’ walk stick. Before you realise it, sitting on a bench by the Thames surfing the web while the sun shines down on you seems completely normal, and you realise you’d far rather be out here than in the office or stuck inside at your desktop. Pleasingly, the stick just works and lets you get on without bothering you when it switches available networks, or by forcing you to use any special software.
Within a couple of years, we’ll start to see wireless internet access like this as standard, built in to new notebooks from the big manufacturers. The infrastructure and technology, as well as pricing, has clearly matured to a point where it is easy and economical to use day-to-day, and it is only a matter of time before things like Centrino 2 and WiMAX bring the internet into a completely wireless age. But before they’re as commonplace as WiFi is now, 3G data sticks like the Web ‘n’ walk are a safe bet.
Post a Comment
You need to be logged in to post comments. Enter your login with your comment. Not registered?