Glitches fail to mask 3G's potential

Early 3G services are getting off to a shaky start, but better is on the way

Over the past few months I have had several opportunities to try out one of Orange's 3G Mobile Office data cards, and I'm afraid I have to report that I have experienced a lot of problems with the service.

When howls of frustration brought my difficulties to the attention of my IT Week colleagues, I discovered that several of them had suffered a similar range of problems with 3G cards supplied by other carriers. Mostly, these involved spectacular Windows blue-screen incidents or devices just refusing to work at all.

The particular card I was using was one of Novatel's Merlin cards supporting the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) standard.

Installing the software is easy and in minutes you can usually be up and running - if you're in the right location and the card is recognised by your laptop. I tried to use the card on various laptops running Intel mobile processors, ranging from the venerable Pentium II, right up to the Dothan - Intel's new flagship Centrino processor.

However, I could only get the Merlin card to work on the Pentium 4 and Dothan-based laptops at IT Week's offices.

Trying the service at home in sunny Tottenham brought hours of misery and messages telling me that my laptop, which previously recognised the card in central London, would not now recognise the card. Rebooting did, on some occasions, get the laptop to recognise the card, but then I found that I simply could not connect to the 3G data service. Sometimes the laptop did a full reset and then provided me with useful details such as register contents and addresses, all in hexadecimal.

Even when the service was up and running, the data transfer rates were often very disappointing, mostly failing to reach 100kbit/s. When the service was running as intended, however, it really flew, delivering close to 350kbit/s and peaking near the theoretical maximum for 3G of 384kbit/s.

So, I think that when problems with the hardware have been sorted out, and 3G coverage has crept out from the metropolitan areas to include most of the rest of the country, 3G services will have a great future, especially as a tool for business communications.

In fact, things could get much better for mobile workers, because enhancements to the current 3G service using High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) could increase data transfer rates to megabits per second. If communication proves reliable at this speed, you could even use it to link a branch office to headquarters, instead of using landlines.

In fact, I suspect the threat from these 3G services is one reason for announcements from BT and other network companies that their broadband speeds will be upgraded to at least 1Mbit/s for no extra cost.

It's a shame the government fleeced the mobile operators by letting them pay billions for 3G licences. If it had capped their bids, HSDPA might have arrived sooner and Vodafone's 3G phone launch would probably be a guaranteed success. As it is, take-up is likely to be slow and steady, with only those who really need high-speed data signing up in the near future.