http://www.drunkenpanda.com

The providers are :
O2 Telefonica (3.6MBPS)
Vodafone (1.4MBPS)
3 (3.6MBPS)

The prices vary from €20 to €40 and O2 offer a unlimited download under FUP policy & fallback to EDGE/3G in areas of bad coverage. It appears we’ll start seeing 7.2MBPS from providers early in 2008.

Its a great technology and theres no restrictions around Skype whether over USB modem or HSDPA enabled handset here.

The services I’ve used in the UK give actual performance of around 800 kbit/s downlink and very slow uplink (64 or 128 kbit/s).

And of course you have latency issues… but overall it’s good technology.

It keeps the email flowing and browser running, at least

I find VOIP (Skype etc) works OK in a pinch, but it’s not exactly a quality experience.

It’s gotta be worth a tenner a month thou’, no?

However I have to say I am delighted with the 3G service on my phone – €20 per month for 2GB with Fring and other VOIP applications allowed under their X-Series package.

Though, one thing that still gets me with these “unlimited” plans is that operators are still capping them up to some limit (e.g., 1 GB max). Seems to still be a major customer deterrent given the lack of real flexibility and freedom. Any idea when operators will operators start offering true unlimited plans (no cap, no limit)?

The only point: VoIP and Skype are forbidden as of july.

Yet two years ago Vodafone Germany changed its Terms of Service (TOS) to reserve its right to block VoIP from the 8th of july 2007 on. But they weren’t sure whether they would really do it. In february 2007 Vodafone Germany’s speaker Heiko Witzke still told me that it was unclear whether or not Vodafone would really adopt the ban.

Now, since the deadline has passed, the German webzine Teltarif inquired and got a straight answer: It’s forbidden to use Vodafone Germany’s data plans for VoIP, says the press department. The other German mobile telephony providers, E-Plus, O2 and T-Mobile, have similar footnotes in their TOS.

My HSDPA using friend had weird problems anyway. The service, Vodafone Mobile Connect, doesn’t run on Windows Vista. But as a newbie he has a brandnew laptop with Microsoft’s latest OS. We installed everything from CD as told. But it did not work and so we went to a Vodafone shop for a reinstallation. The clerk was quite friendly and invested one hour of his valuable time for a reinstallation, but all in vain. Then we went home and downloaded the latest Vodafone Mobile Connect software from the website and did all possible firmware updates. Still no success, although the Vodafone website tells that the latest software should work with Vista.

Luckily we found this solution which tells how to use the Vodafone 3G PCMCIA card as if it was a normal network adapter. This works great. My friend could uninstall the crappy Vodafone software entirely and is now happily surfing the internet.