The Moley Prophet

Finally got hold of the much hyped and controversy plagued M1 Broadband by Vodafone plan. Wonder why a company would want to provide services "by" some overseas competing operator. The plan I was signed on to for this test was the 3.6Mbps using 3.5G or HSDPA technology. At just $68 per month for "unlimited" access it seems pretty affordable. However, the "Fair usage policy" which M1 termed to protect itself meant that you could only used 5GB of bandwidth per month for free.

So anyway, I got hold of the USB Modem made by Hua Wei. I still think its stupid for M1 to have the Vodafone printed on the modem at extra costs, at the underside of the mode, it still prints, Hua Wei. And I'm not impressed by the Vodafone name. Besides that, the USB modem is on loan from M1 if you were to take on the plan, so charges for lost/damage are as follows: $350 for the modem, $20 for the USB cables, $10 for replacement.

Besides the rubbish "Fair usage policy", the 3.6Mbps is also not available outside Central Business District areas. The maximum bandwidth is only 1.8Mbps. But despite that, you won't be reaching the top speeds. I have tried downloading a video from a local server, and the results are definitely disappointing. At home on my MaxOnline 6000, I managed to download the file at 700KB/s, in my office, running on 512kbps ADSL connection from Singnet, the download speed is about 50KB/s, on the 1.8Mbps network, the download speed is 21KB/s after several attempts, the first few attempts produced only speeds of 1-2KB/s. Also, the software from Vodafone showed fluctuating speeds of 100Kbps to 500Kbps, while the actual download speed hardly changes.

Loading a web page is extremely slow as well. It took 20.403 seconds to load The Moley Prophet on M1 Broadband, while it takes only 0.948 seconds on the Singnet ADSL 512Kbps.

However, there are merits for the service as well. The installation of the modem was easy. I just had to plug in the modem, with several available USB cables. The installation program which I supposed was loaded onto the modem starts up with and starts installing by itself. At the end of the installation a Vodafone program is installed. The program tracks bandwidth usage and the speeds which I mentioned about. It seems that the program wasn't able to work harmoniously with my ThinkVantage Access Connections. After I was connected to the Hua Wei modem, I was still connected to my router as well. So I had to manually disable the connection for Access Connections. Connection wise, I was able to connect to the network in my office though the reception was low. The connection was also stable.

Not a wise decision to sign on the plan now as technology is still unstable. It would be best to wait for sometime when competitors come up with their own plans. I heard from the salesman that they are planning to upgrade the speed to 4Mbps.