Three. (is the magic number)

[nath]

My boss has asked me to check out some stuff about 3g stuff. Specifically with regards to wireless internet for laptops.

Basically, he wants to get a tablet pc, have it connected to a 3g service and get reasonably fast internet so we can show off our wares to customers.


I'm not sure if we've got the right end of the stick here. Is 3G like a service, or is just just a range of mobile phones? Is it GPRS that we should be looking in to?

I think he'd like a PCMCIA wireless jobby to access the internet, I presume that'd be GPRS?

I had a look at three.co.uk, it was useless. If anyone has more of a clue than me, any info'd be nice.

Tar

 

[(Shovel)]

I believe that 3G is a range of services and technologies that are supplied over GPRS.

Hence we had the strangely named "2.5G" which occured when GPRS was made available for WAP and MMS, but not quite the whole hog.

*I think*

I'm pretty certainly sure that 3G does not go over a protocol and that it does just use GPRS. Therefore I think any PCMCIA adpater with GPRS and an associated data transfer contract should do the job...

Some emails to some of the more major operators (since you don't need 3G) should hopefully clarify things better than I have!

 

[nath]

Já, just couldn't find an e-mail addy on the 3g site. I'll have to look elsewhere I guess.

 

[(Shovel)]

All the main operators offer data accounts, so don't feel restricted to 3.

 

[Xavier]

Three are the only 3G provider right now and don't offer any data service from their network. The only content is 'wall gardened' within their own network, and their data backbone to the web isn't scheduled to be available until mid-2004.

Depending on the size of your 'wares' you could consider using GPRS with a PCMCIA card solution but as you're paying for the data it could get very costly.

 

[Jonty]

Hi nath

Would you be demonstrating to customers on site or off site? If the customers were coming to you, then you could setup a Wireless LAN of some description. Obviously this would be no good off site, but for that you could simply syncronise all the necessary data so it was stored on the Tablet PC. That way when you're out and about you could still have access to your data, and you wouldn't need an Internet connection.

Kind Regards

 

[nath]

I believe the idea is to have a tablet pc, and demonstrate stuff to people off site. The way we show them is by a link to our Citrix servers back at the office (Citrix is simply rejigged terminal services, it's jolly spiffy). The citrix protocol was designed to be able to run over a 14.4 modem, but it's not fun on that. 56k modem runs it fine, adsl runs it perfectly, you'd not realise that you're connected remotely.

So basically, GPRS will do.. but I'm just trying to find out if there's anything better. So is 3g gprs or something else?

 

[Xavier]

3G is both EDGE and UMTS - on 'Three' at the moment expect data rates of 384kbps, but only to their own network (there's no external access available) - because they only offer 2G fallback most of the devices don't offer anything other than CSD fallback.

Give the Vodaphone mobile connect card a look, with a gprs enabled sim you'll get 43kbps peak, which is the best you can expect at the moment.

 

[Lester]

Or if you've got the money - mobile satellite.

 

[nath]

Satellite wouldn't work for something as active as Citrix, data is being sent/received constantly so ping time is an issue.