Last month I went to my hometown of Nottingham for a weekend to see relatives. I needed to work while I was there but there was no broadband where I was staying, but I thought that between my BT mobile broadband dongle, my netbook and my iPhone 3GS I’d have enough internet access to ‘survive’. My BT mobile broadband dongle provides 1GB of bandwidth per month and I thought that would be more than enough for a few days access. However, within 2 hours of usage my connection went and after calling BT I realised that I’d amazingly already used up 1GB of bandwidth. I was flabbergasted as apart from using the dongle at home for about 30-60 minutes that month when my broadband connection went down, I don’t think I’d used it that month.
Buying extra bandwidth from BT wasn’t an option as it would have cost an absolutely ridiculous £1.50/MB – it would have been cheaper to buy a broadband connection for a year. I had my iPhone 3GS with me so I decided I’d call O2 to setup internet tethering, which would allow me to use my iPhone as a 3G modem with my laptop. At £10/mth it’s too expensive to use all the time, but I was desperate and the alternative with BT was even worse. After double-checking with O2 that I could cancel the internet tethering the following month I activated the service, and I was told the service would take up to 2 hours to activate.
Over 24 hours later the iPhone tethering service still wasn’t live. When I called O2 to complain they said the service can take up to 24 hours to activate, which I wish someone had told me in advance. I couldn’t believe that it would take that long to activate a service, particularly one that people will probably need at short notice. So, in the end I wasted £10 on a service I never got to use.
The moral of this story? If you think you will need iPhone tethering signup at least 2 days in advance. Or, if you are brave use google and find one of the many iPhone tethering hacks.
