3G and HSDPA Data Cards for business

Access to the Internet, office systems and email while "on the go" has become a need for many business travellers. While the wireless hotspot revolution has been underway for some time, they are still not ubiquitous. Hotel access is also not a given even in Europe although the US is generally well provisioned unless you end up in a very cheap motel.

The main UK operators, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone have all been providing data cards for many years. Initially these cards supported GPRS, then 3G and now they will work over the High Speed Data Packet Access (HSDPA) networks, often referred to as Mobile Broadband or 3G Broadband.

IT PRO decided to put 3G Data Cards from the leading UK operators to the test to see how they performed in five cities and one airport.

3G cards are most likely to be used by business users to connect to their office while in hotels or at home. To see how widespread support across mainland UK is, IT PRO decided on five cities and one airport at which to test cards. The locations chosen were:

London - Cornhill, near the Bank of England.

Cardiff - Queen Street near Junction with Friary.

Birmingham - Ludgate Hill near Junction with Queensway.

Manchester - Back George Street.

Edinburgh - Lothian Street near Sheraton Grand Hotel.

Heathrow T2 - Costa Coffee between departure and arrivals gate.

The Tests

The tests were designed to simulate typical user scenarios.

1.Installation. Getting the card to install and doing pre-trip tests.

2.Internet. Opening up a link to the internet and browsing a few pages including the BBC News and Sports pages.

3.Speed. Connecting to www.adslguide.org and running its independent speed test. As these cards are sold as being 3G Broadband, we decided on this as a good independent test.

4.Exchange. Connecting to an Exchange server using a web browser and sending/reading email over an Outlook Web Access link. To prevent problems with encrypted connections we chose to do this over http rather than https.

5.IMAP. Connecting to an IMAP mail server using Microsoft Outlook, downloading mail, synchronising folders and sending/receiving email.

6.POP3. Connecting to a POP3 mail server using Microsoft Outlook, downloading mail, synchronising folders and sending/receiving email.

7.VPN Access. Connecting to a corporate network using a Sonicwall firewall and using the Sonicwall Global VPN client to connect to a desktop and server to read files.

None of these tests can be considered in the remotely complex or out of the norm for users.

3G Cards

Each of the operators was given a minimum of five weeks notice, via their press offices, of the tests that we were intending to conduct. This was done via email to ensure that they had the best opportunity to provision services. Despite this both Vodafone and O2 delivered newer cards to us on the morning of the actual test.

In the case of Vodafone this was due to us receiving the wrong card and thus, the company wanted to ensure we had the latest model. O2 changed the card because they had just ceased sale of the original model supplied on the day before the test was due totake place. Thus, O2 wanted to ensure that we had the card that we due to go on sale at the time of publication. Not unreasonable but a little more notice would have been welcome.