The Unwired connection at home has not been without its share of problems in the past. When I moved into my apartment, I signed a 6 month lease and it didn’t seem like a good idea to take a 12 month DSL contract. At that stage there wasn’t much available in the GPRS/3G market that wasn’t expensive and didn’t require a 24 month commitment. I decided that based on the fact that Unwired supplied an Ethernet modem (much easier to get working on Linux as there are no drivers), I would give them a try despite reading some pretty bad reviews.
Unwired uses the 3.5GHz range and when I first tried to get a connection, there was massive interference in the area. This would disappear around 10pm and then start again at 6am … not useful when wanting to browse and check email in the evenings!
As I had paid for the modem, I didn’t want to admit defeat so I moved it around my apartment for a frustrating couple of hours until it landed in the current location (taped to the inside of the lounge window). I tried removing the fold-up antenna but that didn’t seem to make a difference although it did stop the device roaming from the side to the main antenna and back every couple of minutes. The heavy baking tray in the picture is to try and screen the "wabbit" from interference that seems to emanate from directly opposite to the Unwired tower. There is a D-link wireless router on the floor that is connected to the Unwired modem that eliminated the hassle of running Cat5 around the lounge.
Well, a couple of months down the track and I get peaks of around 90Kb/s which is adequate for what I do, although the service is still far too unstable for Skype with drop-outs every couple of minutes. I noticed that they have upped the speed on the prepaid service to 1024/256 ... thats an improvement!
I may try a 3G service at some stage as they are now cheaper but the idea of trying to get a USB modem working on Ubuntu doesn’t appeal!
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