broadband question...this i have never heard off

[eastyy]

http://www.perlico.ie/mobile/mobileinternet.aspx

anyone tried that sort of broadband....is it any good ?

[babs]

Yeah I've had people connected to the project I work for connected with 3G. It works fine, but is obviously dependent on your coverage. I think standard 3G will go up to about 1.4Mbit. Vodafone do a similar thing over here.

[VR46]

Vodafone advertised it in yesterdays Evening Standard, more details on vodafone.co.uk apparently. They charge £25 a month plus vat for the service.

Would it work with Xbox Live Babs ? guess that's what eastyy is getting at ?

[babs]

I've no idea what the latency is like, which is what the main sticking point with online play. Nor do I know what the fluctuations in bandwidth are like if the weather gets bad or owt.

Useful aren't I?

[eastyy]

cheers for the reply i phoned them up yesterday and its all academic as i have no coverage lol

but today have people calling around might be able to get wireless

[cavalcade]

HSDPA has a theoretical limit of around 1.4Mb, but actual real world speeds are down to how close you are to the mast, and how many other people are connected as well. Expect around 450kb - 600kb to be typical. Latency on HSDPA (the 3G capable of reaching those speeds) is around 125ms typically. Not ideal for twitch shooters, but would be passable for less reaction focused Live titles.

In an area without HSDPA, you would revert to traditional 3G, with far lower speeds (around 384kb theoretical maximum, often running much less than that). Latency would increase to around 250ms. This would be pretty unusable for most gaming, although something slow and measured like Uno might work at a push.

In non 3G areas you'd be down to GPRS territory - which is not much better than dial up. So be sure to check coverage!

The Vodafone deal is pretty good, though the actual modem is a pig to install on XP, and also includes a little bit of spyware just to keep you company.

I'd watch for 3 - their Irish operation does a very cheap 10gb max allowance package for less than half the price of Vodafone, and I'd expect them to repeat that here. Their coverage is better, though that's traditional 3G, they are somewhat coy on their HSDPA rollout strategy.

[cavalcade]

I should also point out that HSDPA should, year on year, get sizable speed boosts, with 3.6Mb packages available next year, and 7.2Mb packages after that. Latency might still be an issue, but within 2 years expect to see mobile operators beginning to press fixed wire operators, especially for people like me who live far from ADSL equipped exchanges and struggle to get above 512k connections.

[eastyy]

woo i am getting broadband....well its 90% likely ....and for free to