Mobile Broadband & Ubuntu

I'm currently in the throws of moving house - So when I call good old Virgin Media to get my service transferred to the new place, they tell me that they can't do it until 10 days after we move in. I can't be without broadband for this long!

So I think about getting a umts/hsdpa modem from 3 - they have them on offer for £50 on pre-pay. The tariffs aren't too bad either 7GB for £25.

I visit the 3 store and they only have the ZTE modem, which are a little more tricky to get working under Linux, or so I've read. Once I got home and registered the modem using an XP machine, I then look up getting this modem running under Ubuntu. This took five minutes and once I changed the connection (in the network manager) I was online.

The speeds seem about expected - around the 1-2Mb/s but I'll know more once I've used it under more suitable conditions.