[Ben]

Having a play with my Vodafone E220 modem on the Mac mini and seeing some odd issues tonight.

I'm connected on HSDPA, but earlier I was only getting 40kbps up and down with 2000ms latency. Then it improved some (http://www.speedtest.net/result/259008515.png), and the improvement seems to be continuing.

Are these signs of capacity issues? At 21:30 on a Sunday night? :S

Edit: Back to 1000ms latency again now. Not feeling very Mobile Broadband like!

[Hands0n]

It is most likely engineering work by Vodfone given the time and day. I'm not in a position to try it out tonight :( The whole technology deployment is so very new and there is some way to go before it is completely in prime-time mode.

Rotten latency - completely useless for many uses.

[Ben]

Yeah maybe, hope so anyway. Things are returning to normal now, am getting in the region of 200ms latency, though throughput is still a bit retarded. As far as usability goes, though, it's back :D

Have just set the VPN up on the mini (OS X makes connecting to VPN's so easy!), which means no skanky image compression - hurrah! It also means not worrying about what's going on in that black box that is Vodafone. We know a lot about our fixed line ISP's, but very little about what the mobile networks do with our traffic or just how secure the connectins are. Might have to blog about that tomorrow ;)

[Hands0n]

Careful with that VPN stuff - even when not in use it has some background chat that will eat into your data allowance :eek:

[Ben]

I'd be interested to know just how hungry a VPN is. I mean, yes, using data over a VPN is going to consume more bandwidth because of the encryption, and it'd be interesting to know the stats there alone, but in terms of chatter - surely it's just a keep alive? I do notice HSDPA 'deactivate' when I'm on the VPN, so at least I can be sure it's not constant consumption.