I purchased the Smartone Vodafone Mobile Broadband as it appeared to offer much promise of a truly mobile broadband, excited I started using the service. Check out the data points here.

I purchased umlimited and also understood that I couldn’t torrent or use with an peer-to-peer file sharing arrangement, the terms of service are described here. Ok I get it, don’t abuse the network with a lot of downloads, the network can’t handle it. Fine, I only use it for e-mail and web browsing.

Perhaps the fine print that I should have paid more attention to was this:

SmarTone-Vodafone has the absolute discretion to forthwithlimit your data throughput or amount of your data transferred, or suspend/terminate the Service without notice, upon the occurrence of any one or more of the circumstances specified above.

The service was working fine, I wasn’t getting the promised 3.6Mbps but I was getting good speeds of around 1Mbps, but then I hit 400 megabytes of usage (I have an unlimited plan) and I got the below, 50bps speeds

and this too…4.7 kbps, the service basically became completely useless to me. I could not access the Internet with any reasonable speed, I can browse but I could not send out any e-mails that had attachments that were around the 250K size, nevermind sending out 5 megabyte powerpoints, forget that. Essentially in an attempt to provide all-you-can-eat bandwidth, they have compromised the service quality and are proclaiming that the future is HSDPA? Not like this guys, either the people who developed this system don’t understand that people use the Internet in vastly different ways or they are just hoping that people won’t be using more than 400 Megabytes a month? You have got to be kidding me, in this case I have only sent e-mails, how many e-mails with powerpoints do you receive in a month? How big are those powerpoints, let’s say they are 5 megabytes, that’s 80 powerpoints in a month, or 2.6 powerpoints a day. I don’t know about you, but in any corporate environment I have attachments flying around everywhere.

I am very dissapointed, if you expect me to pay more than HK400 for this service a month you are mistaken, I’ve essentially just paid HK1 per megabyte of real internet usage, and the rest was a paltry dial-up experience, completely unusable as work broadband.

Stay away from this service and pay attention to this:

SmarTone-Vodafone has the absolute discretion to forthwithlimit your data throughput or amount of your data transferred

Let’s hope we get real WiFi everywhere, at least we don’t get rate limited to less than dial-up speeds, at least a modem provides 56k speeds.

All floors have coverage, I was pretty amazed, having lunch, popped out my laptop and voila! There was FON_FreeWifi. IFC is connected to the Hong Kong Airport Express and is Hong Kong’s International Finance Center, lots of restaurants and shops around, very cool.

So I had dinner in Happy Valley on Sing Woo Road and guess what, I saw a FON signal, I promptly logged in, it’s great! I was in a japanese restaurant called Yakitoritei at that time, not sure where the signal came from but it was great to have it, and use it!

Spread the free Wi-Fi!