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Alas there is no broadband on Fladda and given that there is no telephone service it is unlikely there will be one in the foreseeable future. At present I use my GPRS enabled trusty mobile phone (a C500) as a modem to my laptop, connected via bluetooth. This works reasonably well for downloading / uploading but browsing seems to be painful beyond belief, I think that the GPRS link gives me about 70K actual line speed. I write this blog offline and then upload it to get around that problem.

Anyway I would dearly like to have a broadband link on Fladda so have been watching what has been happening in the 3G space. I was talking to someone I know about G3 enabled modem card (well it was EVDO actually) which they were using and were very enthusiastic about it, saying that they got about 400K line speed. EVDO is of course not supported anywhere but the US so I need an EDGE or UMTS card such as on one of the Vodaphone cards. Vodaphone has the best signal of all the carrier's on Fladda (it still wont work near the range in the Kitchen though!) but I am not sure about their 3G coverage. Anyway I would have to buy a new 3G phone or PCMICA card which would still only give me dual ISDN levels of performance which is hardly great. On top of that I would then also have to pay the 3G data rate charge which is not insignificant if you spend as much time online as I do. So I have been sticking to my old GPRS / Bluetooth setup as it works well and doesn't cost too much but have been thinking a lot about how to improve my line speed.

Anyway I have come up with a really bright idea to get very high speed broadband out on Fladda which costs very little and has Mb performance. It involves Pringles cans and I will blog about when I have done a bit more investigation.