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By Julia Kukiewicz
Editor
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
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IN our ongoing quest to bring you the best in broadband we're going to be testing mobile broadband modems from all of the the major providers.
In our first highly unscientific test we'll be looking at the Huwai E169 USB modem. The E169 is the mobile broadband dongle available with O2 Mobile Broadband Pay Monthly and the O2 Mobile Broadband + Asus 1005H Laptop and O2 Mobile Broadband + Samsung R519 Laptop deals.
We gave the O2 mobile broadband service with Huawai E169 modem an overall score of 4 out of 5, find out why below.
First impressions
Rating: 
We tested a sleekish black version of the O2 Mobile Broadband dongle, which is also available in white.
It was easy to set up - just a question of inserting the SIM card and plugging it in. Once plugged in it was quick to get going on a PC with windows XP and the O2 Connection Manager software installed without incident; we went from box to broadband in 07 minutes 32.6 seconds.
We knocked off two points. One for the modem's bulky outer casing, which made it impossible to plug anything else into surrounding USB ports and one for the slightly irritating interface that Mac users have to put up with.
The first docked point is perhaps a little unfair since the modem will come with a USB cable when you get it with an O2 mobile broadband package which will make it a bit more usable.
The second docked point came from our token Mac user who was less impressed when he found that - although he had no problem getting online - he couldn't install O2's connection manager. That meant that he could see how much time he had left but not the usage allowance left in GBs, "a pain since I run through my usage allowance pretty quickly."
We also noticed that Windows 7 users will need to download a different version of connection manager but this is available from the O2 site.
Speed tests
Rating: TBA
We did speed tests throughout the day in an area with good 3G/HSDPA signal.
The average download speed found on speedtest.net was 0.27 Mb/s and 0.99 Mb/s using internetfrog.com.
Since O2 mobile broadband promises speeds of up to 7.2 Mb/s in HSDPA areas this was a little disappointing - the highest speed we recorded all day was just 1.23 Mb/s.
Upload speeds were also fairly low, although an average of 0.16 Mb/s isn't too bad in comparison to the download speeds.
We also tested ping rates and jitter on pingtest.net.
The ping rate illustrates the quality of the broadband connection by measuring the time it takes for a packet of data to be sent from your computer to the server and back again - the lower the ping rate, the better the connection. The average ping rate we found with O2 was 250 milliseconds. To put that in context, a good home broadband connection will have a rate of around 20ms or even lower.
Jitter is exactly what it sounds like - how 'wobbly' the broadband connection is measured in the difference between different ping rates. Again: the lower the rate, the better. With O2 we found a jitter rate of 121 ms.
Poor ping and jitter rates, sometimes called poor or high latency, are notoriously most noticeable when playing games online. For most users, though, they'll just result in some pages taking slightly longer than usual to respond.
No stars for this test as yet because we're waiting to see how the other mobile broadband providers will compare - watch this space.
Pictures and experience
Rating: 
Despite the poor recorded speeds we saw, we actually had a pretty good browsing experience with O2 mobile broadband.
Pages of text loaded quickly and emails were sent and received at a brisk pace too.
We listened to music using Spotify and didn't hear any stuttering and BBC iplayer TV programmes, although they did take a little longer than usual to load, were pretty smooth once they got going.
The one thing to watch out for is O2's 'image optimisation'. To speed up the connection, images are downloaded at a lower resolution than a normal broadband connection which we really noticed when browsing pictures and shopping online. The clothes site asos.com was particularly pixellated, for example.
However, on most sites the optimisation was barely noticeable and, unless you're a fine art dealer, it shouldn't put you off O2 mobile broadband so we're giving them 4 stars out of five.
Our rural broadband illustration on a home broadband connection:
And with O2 mobile broadband...
Topping up
Rating: 
The mobile broadband dongle we were using was on a Pay as You Go contract - although, as we mentioned above, this modem is now only available on pay monthly contracts.
If there's one thing that mobile broadband providers are good at it's taking your money and sure enough it was easy to top up, with the prices and usage allowances in GBs clearly indicated and a credit card form with Verified by Visa and Mastercard Secure enabled.
You can also view usage you have left on pay monthly contracts using the connection manager.
An easy score, but 5 stars none the less.
Extras
Rating:
One of O2 mobile broadband's major selling points is the unlimited free access it grants to wi-fi in 'The Cloud'.
It was easy to find mobile broadband hotspots with a postcode search on the O2 site (hint: McDonalds and Café Nero feature heavily) and once we were there it was really simple to get online.
We were disappointed that there weren't any free web texts available as this is a nice extra with O2 home broadband so we knocked a point off for that.
Check back to see how the O2 mobile broadband modem compares with modems from other providers in future tests. Impressed already? Read more about O2 mobile broadband in our reviews.
Our review was based on a day of testing and shouldn't be taken as the last word by any means. If you've got something to say about our review of O2 mobile broadband please feel free to send your thoughts to so that we can use them to help our users.
O2 mobile broadband speed test results (13th January 2010)
Internetfrog.com 
Speedtest.net
Pingtest.net
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