Brief techie note

I have been playing with a 3G data modem, and I am completely converted. It’s often at least as fast as most communal wifi, and a great deal cheaper and more secure. I hate juggling with the the firewall every time I connect to a new access point. The coverage is patchy; inside Liverpool Street station, I could only get dialup speeds and sometimes on the train the connection would drop entirely. But the station always used to be a black spot for ordinary cellphone reception, too, and for much of the journey I was getting perfectly acceptable speeds. One of the Guardian’s leader writers taught me a useful trick for getting net access in strange offices — just pull the network cable out of the nearest machine and plug it into your laptop — but this does seem a very much tidier solution. What’s even nicer is that it is pay as you go. If I am not going into London, I need pay nothing that month. The only small sadness is that it may be network locked. The salesperson would not give me a straight answer about that, and I don’t know who 3’s network partners are abroad, from whom I would buy a payg data card.