I’m writing this in Richmond, United Kingdom. Some people think that Richmond qualifies as “London” but I fear those people are misguided. It’s nine miles from the Houses of Parliament or 10.7 miles from Threadneedle Street (for the Bank of England).
It’s not London. BUT it’s got 4G. Richmond is one of those lucky areas to have received EE’s 4G right-away.
This proving rather useful because I am doing a lot of work in the town and can thus continue to give EE’s 4G network (and their Huawei supplied E589 mobile hotspot) a good work out.
As well as doing the general internet stuff I’m also using LogMeIn to connect back to my computer at home. My current session has been live for 42 minutes and I’ve knocked back a fairly reasonable 72mb of data.
The user experience is brilliant, both the network speed and the device. The Huawei’s battery is simply brilliant — so much so that I’ve been keeping it in activated in my pocket as I travel and as I walk around Richmond. It’s rather useful given my primary handset cellular connectivity is provided by Vodafone — who can only deliver me an E (“Edge”) service at the best of times that seems to offer something like 0.2kbps throughput on a good day.
Speed is always in the eye of the beholder. Yes it’s 26mb down and 10mb up according to Speedtest.net but really it’s all about how it feels, right?
It feels great. I am not aware that I’m using a mobile connection — praise indeed, eh?
According to that little image above there, my connection is “Grade A” and faster than 87% of the United Kingdom’s internet users. Hah!
I am noticing the difference between this 4G connection from EE and my usual alternative from Three. It’s a lot faster on the throughput basically. Megabytes fly down. I had the opportunity to verify the difference in my mind when I forgot the EE unit one day last week. Three’s service was still perfectly workable — but I was still slightly aware I was connected via mobile.
I should point out that I’m using this MiFi unit and data connection by the grace of EE themselves who’ve provided it for me on long term test.
If you’re hunting for a mobile solution, do take a look at EE, especially if you’re in (or planning to regularly be in) a 4G area. You can check out EE’s business data plans here.
