3 Mobile Huawei Dongle Review

“For the first 4 months 3 Mobile Huawei E160G worked a...”

Written on: 19/07/2009

For the first 4 months 3 Mobile Huawei E160G worked a charm. After that it started behaving wierd. The dialer application would say "connected" but if the connection is idle for about half a minute continously it will secretly disconnect but the dialer still displays connected. I won't be able to ping. It has got nothing to do with the software I have installed as the same problem developed concurrently on Vista and Fedora (which they don't support) and my browsing and usage pattern completely vary on both OS's. But the customer care just wouldn't understand all this and I would have to go through an immense ordeal to even get across the frontal parrots (one of them told me I dont need a connection to be able to ping and if i can't ping there's something wrong with the laptop) to speak to a technical person. And the so called technical team also can't do anything. It is a non-integrated bunch of software/hardware/network combo from various vendors and they leave it to your hands to establish which one is having a problem, by repetitively directing you to do silly things one by one, like try with another laptop, go to a different location and try it (i did that and there was no connection in the place i went!), try on a PC etc. Finally they told me it looks like a problem with the modem and they will take the modem and return it in 3 days. I asked if I could be given a replacement for those 3 days and the answer was what I expected ofcourse. By then I had found a workaround myself. If I keep a ping -t www.xxabcd.com running on the background the connection is never idle and the clever modem doesn't disconnect. So unwilling to be disconnected altogether for 3 days, I lived with the problem. One fine day the modem apparently downloaded some updates and the skin of the application changed. And the above problem had seemed to have gone. But after a month a different version of the problem. This time, it still shows connected but even ping wouldn't work. And the guilty application/modem tries to reconnect after a while (visible because it opens the 3 homepage everytime it connects). So now it basically keeps dropping and reconnecting every 5 minutes. Beware guys don't go for this unless you have a strong cause and see if you can go for a pay-as-you-go or short contracts.