abroadband.com USB Stick

Journal jawtheshark's Journal: abroadband.com USB Stick 2

Journal by jawtheshark on Monday March 21, 2011 @08:49PM

If you have ads enabled on slashdot, you might have noticed abroadband.com. Basically, it's an Australian service that promises wireless broadband for 0,59€/MB pretty much anywhere you are in the world. At first this might seem expensive, especially if you have a cellphone plan that includes unlimited usage within your country. These exist where I live, especially for iPhones and go for a 50€/month, but the "unlimited" part is obviously only in Luxembourg. Pass the border and you're in for some financial surprise. Regardless, I find a 50€/month plan excessive. My plan is 0€/month and 0,09€/min and 0,09€/SMS. We rarely pass the 25€ mark per month with two cellphones on the plan. Data, is expensive... I calculated it roughly as being 2€/MB. Since we don't have smartphones, it's no issue.

So, from my point of view, the abroadband service is a pretty acceptable offer for low-usage and especially "on vacation" usage. From my experience, wireless access in hotels is mostly paying too and their rates aren't exactly cheap.

I ordered the stick + SIM option, which I got in the mail this morning. You first need to activate the service and it would have been nice if they had told that you needed your order number to do that. Anyway, first attempt was on Ubuntu 10.04 on my work computer during lunch. The stick was not detected, but after some googling, I found that you needed to install a package, namely "usb-modeswitch". After that it was detected correctly as a Huawei E173. Alas, no way to get it running using the gnome network applet.

Tonight, I felt bold and fired up the Asus EEE 701 4G (which is the most likely candidate for on-vacation usage) running Debian Squeeze. I think the "usb-modeswitch" comes with the "Laptop" meta-package. Basically, it was plug-in, enter PIN and go online. Well, not really online as I first needed to do the registration with abroadband. Interesting, factoid: the gnome network manager (which works fine with LXDE, thank you very much) marks the connection with "R" so you know you're roaming. With this stick you'll obviously always be roaming, but I like the little touch.

As said before, during the registration, I needed the order number. I had it at hand, since I was at home, but for someone activating the service while on vacation it would be much less fun if you didn't have the required information. Apart from that it was painless.

After registration, you have to wait around five minutes.... and yes, it works. Slashdot.org, Google (I go over Austria... Okay, not complaining), Last.fm (not too long, that would get expensive), ssh to my servers. The only thing that didn't work was facebook. Why this is, I have no idea.

It's obvious I won't use it very often, but is a great option to have as a backup (if the DSL goes down, for example) or when I'm really on vacation.

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