Question Before I Cancel My Account

[quarentine]

Hello,

I have a Huawei E220 modem on a 30-day rolling contract. I'm using a MacBook with OS X 10.5.6.
First of all, I live in E3 which I would think is quite central, but there's no stable 3G signal in my house. Furthermore no signal outside either. Changing position or orientation of devices doesn't make a noticeable defference. No modem faults, I've checked with a 3G vodafone mobile phone with the same results. Occasionally I'm able to connect 3G but I loose the signal in a couple of minutes and the modem either changes to GPRS or simply stops all transmission. Ok, so I select GPRS only and the modem still stops working after a period of time. This can be one minute, or 35.

I think I don't have to go into details why this service is unusable, as the connection is lost randomly, I cannot use skype etc. etc. As my average measured bandwidth is 2.7kByte/sec on GPRS, this is 166 times slower than the advertised 3.6Mbit/sec. I understand that this is a theoretical maximum, but come on, 0.021Mbit/sec in E3? Thats hilarious.

I have upgraded to the latest vodafone software, as the previous version didn't even work under Leopard and caused a kernel panic. I have tried to put the sim card into a mobile phone and select manually a not supported network, try to connect, then put it back into the modem and connect using automatic network selection. This method in itself is again hilarious. No luck whatsoever.

My question is : can vodafone do anything about this problem, or are they unable to provide the service as advertised?

Regards,
Csaba

[Neil_Brown]

If there's no decent coverage in your house, then, no, there's no a huge amount that can be done - do you get problems if you use the system in an area with good coverage?

[quarentine]

If there's no decent coverage in your house, then, no, there's no a huge amount that can be done - do you get problems if you use the system in an area with good coverage?

There's decent coverage of gprs and yes I still have the aforementioned problems with selecting only gprs connection. There's no 3g on the street either. That's not what your website shows.

[JD]

Hi Csaba

Welcome to the eForum. You've come to the right place for help.

There are a finite number of possible causes for your troubles, so if we rule out as many as possible, we'll have a better idea of what we need to fix. The potential causes are:

Modem Fault
Sim Fault
Signal Strength
Network Fault
Computer Fault

You've already ruled out a modem fault as you experience the same problem with the Sim in a 3G phone. Did you use the phone as a tethered modem, or just have problems surfing on the phone itself? If it wasn't as a tethered modem, and you still had the problem then this would rule out a problem with your computer. If it was as a tethered modem, we'd still need to determine if your Mac was causing the problem, by trying the modem in a different computer.

In regards to signal, I've checked the coverage in your area and it does look to be good, apart from a small patch close to you, but mainly centred around the nearby church. It's possible that you're in a black spot, could you take your Mac and modem to a different area and see if you have the same problem. If you don't have the problem elsewhere, this would indicate that the signal is the problem as I've checked the sites in your area and they are currently running at a 98.3% success rate for data. If you do have problems elsewhere, we'd need to replace your Sim. If you go into a Vodafone shop you'll be able to get a free replacement as yours would be faulty.

I'm really glad I could help and I'm sure you'll be up and running in no time.

Cheers

J
eForum Team