Tech works well, sometimes signal is a little low, but I think that's true of all providers. However, DO NOT use 3. They are very untrustworthy, unhelpful, and frankly will take as much money off you as they can.

This was a nightmare and 3G did nothing about it. The connect never worked more than a few minutes then nothing at all. They sent another dongle, same thing. I had so much trouble trying to cancel my contract as I did not want to pay for something that didnt work. They still want me to pay 268 pounds for something I could never use. It turned out that where I lived was a bad area for 3G at the time and of course the phone shop knew this. The debt is now with a debt company after me for payment. I am seeking advice from Citizens advice. A big joke! Just because on the shops system it showed a good reception that was not true at all!

I recently spent a week in London as a tourist from NYC. Before leaving the US I called Vodafone in London and told them I wanted a sim card for my iPhone so that I could use it to tether my laptop (I wanted to use my phone as a hotspot for my laptop). They told me that their "international freebie" card would be perfect for this purpose. When I got to Heathrow I bought the sim card, they installed it, and all was supposedly great. As I was leaving the terminal the salesperson caught up with me and apologized, saying that they had just realized the tethering plan wouldn't work. I followed him back to the shop, and they told me that I'd also need to buy a dongle. They didn't have them in stock, so the next day I bought one in the city. I initially had 500Mb of data, which the Vodafone salesperson assured me would be enough for a week of websurfing, email, and Facebook (no movies or music streaming). I attached the dongle that evening and it worked fine. That first night I spent perhaps two hours online. The next evening, after another sightseeing day, I returned to my hotel and went online again, and after about an hour the dongle disconnected, telling me I had exhausted the data plan! I was in shock--this 500MB of data had run out in around 3 hours. Vodafone customer service isn't available after 8, so I had to wait until the next day to contact them. They were very unhelpful, saying they had no way to know what I was doing online, etc. Insult to injury, while a foreign credit card was perfectly fine to purchase their sim card and dongle, it wasn't acceptable as a way to top up online or over the phone! So I went to a tobacco shop and bought a $50BP voucher, and, unbelievably, this lasted for about three more hours!! What an incredible rip-off! Once connected, the counter would show data download when there was nothing at all running on the computer--the browser closed, no updates, no email programs running. I called to complain about this and while waiting for someone to answer the counter showed I had used 20Mb of data!! I would say avoid Vodafone dongles or data plans like the plague.

We bought 3-mobile internet dongles (Huawei), each on a £15.99 one month rolling contract with 5GB download limit. We went for the one month contract as we only wanted the mobile internet to cover us until BT could be bothered to come around and connect our new house up. One of the dongles never seemed to work right, it gave terrible download speeds (couldn't even check email or browse sites like the BBC) and the connection would drop regularly. The other dongle was better as the connection didn't drop, however the download speed was still poor, sites with videos like youtube or lots of pictures like eBay were not usable. Also, the online account management didn't work properly, the page was always unavailable - so you couldn't really check your data useage. The contract has a 30-day cancel notice, meaning you must give them 30days warning, which is fair enough I guess. However, the call centre is terrible and would not take no for an answer, keeping us on the phone (premium rate of course) for ages and basically trying to bully us into not cancelling. I have also had a phone with 3-mobile for nearly 18 months now and never had a problem, but after this experience I will be switching phone provider too. 3-mobile are cheap but they are cheap for a reason... think twice. ps: I posted a similar view in another section of this site about3-mobile broadband and I thought I would post it here as well, just so people get the message.

3 mobile pay as you go. I have had this thing a week and only been connected online for about a couple of hours all together, It keeps cutting out and then coming back online for a couple of seconds and then dies again. it is the biggest load of crud I have ever had to try and work with.

Signed up to a 24 month contract to replace my T Mobile dongle which had been quite reliable. However, after having several problems installing the modem it eventually started working. That all changed however, after about 3 months it started losing connection completely for no apparent reason, this would happen every 2-5 minutes which was very annoying indeed. Rang customer support and was told that a firmware upgrade might solve the problem, but however, when I asked how to do one as there wasnt a link on the three homepage, the adviser said that it wasnt necessary?!... I have since learned that a firmware upgrade doesnt exist on the UK three network (it does on others) and I am stuck with the problem....

I signed up for this on 3, when first out and have just upgraded now to another HUAWEI, but this time E1550(after 2 years). To be honest, I have generally been pretty happy with this modem, overall it has provided the service that I required.
The only problem with this, now, is that it is, apparently, missing some important updates that are present on the more recent modems. This means that I can now lose connection quite easily, especially at times of heavy internet usage in my location - and this (for some reason) has been very annoying for the last two weeks in particular. I tend to use around 3gig or more per month - so it may well be that I would not have noticed the problem with 1gig or less usage? I have rated it, overall, at 3/5 now. Had I reviewed this item several months ago, it would have scored higher.

The Huawei E220 works reasonably well, likes a good signal. But I do find it unreliable, prone to moisture ingress, mine lasted 6 months and the manufacturer refused to repair anger warranty. Overall a reasonably useful unit, but lacks reliability and manufacturers back up.

Very slow than advertised speed of 3.6mb usually speed is around 0.3mb to 0.6mb. would not recommend to anyone.

To some degree 3mobile is using false advertising but if you read the fine print at the bottom of these statement; it explains..
3(three) states that mobile broadband speeds are a THEORETICAL speeds of 3.6Mb BUT actual speeds vary in the range of 600k-1.6Mb approx. and depends of multiple factors, ie. network traffic, computer performance etc etc.

*If you look at alot of ISP plans etc, the often advertise Theoretical internet speeds as a luring point because the actual speeds are much slower,

-Overall if your just after a simple internet connection for a PC/laptop its definitely value for money. Works great for the average user!
However if you plan on using your internet for more then usual everyday browsing, cabled broadband is probably the better option.

The 3 Mobile Huawei E169G has been an utter disappointment for me. It promises speeds up to 3.5 Meg but frequently I find it as slow as dial up.

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.

My 3 Mobile Huawei E160G is incredibly slow, it's performance equal to 56k modem. The drivers won't update, drops connection all the time. tried it in several locations, no difference.

There's a problem using this 3 Mobile Huawei E160G on some mac operating systems. It often requires you to switch the computer off altogether. I think I've found a solution though. If you don't use the 3connect application, but dial up from the telephone icon at the top of the screen, it seems to work fine. This means you can't see what kind of signal you have, which is not ideal.