It all started when I wanted to do something, with my own money, about our ADSL internet from O2. Its speed is not very good, considering it is 2015: https://rychlost.cz/vysledek/20153476983-7bb5/ . Through the hotline I ordered a T-Mobile SIM card/plan https://www.t-mobile.cz/osobni .
The nearest LTE transmitter is 6 km away, but on my balcony I can pick up LTE from T-Mobile, so I figured that with a modem for 3,451 CZK (the standard price without a contract) it would work even indoors, high up on the upper floor, and where there is no LTE, 3G would work fine. It was a huge disappointment when, on the day my SIM card arrived, I went to the Trinec T-Mobile store for the modem at that price.
The lady at the branch was annoyed that I had not signed the contract through her, and she wanted me to cancel it and sign it again through her, with a commitment period. When I stood my ground (which was a stupid move, I know that now), she angrily sold me the modem and I plugged it in at home. At home I first tried LTE on the ground floor, but it did not connect even when I forced the network. So 3G then, that should be better, I told myself.
I managed to connect, I was running around the room like a madman trying different spots. In the end, by the TV, I measured 2-13 Mb/s for download, and as for upload, I no longer remember, I would only be making it up. The worst part, though, was that the network was often “dead” – the ping climbed many times in a row to hundreds of ms, and I did not have the nerves for that; pages would only load with the patience of a saint.
I was not giving up yet. I put it upstairs, as high as I could, on top of the kitchen cabinets. LTE did connect this time (0-2 bars out of 5), but the network was even deader than on 3G. During a speed test it would jump to 20 Mb/s, then for maybe 1.2 s it did nothing at all, which dropped the speed to 12 Mb/s, and so on, over and over, and the download result usually ended up around 11 Mb/s.
That stung. I have a modem for 3,500 CZK here that I cannot return, and a plan with no contract, but then there is all the hassle with cancelling it. Especially since T-Mobile itself is not clear on it. The people on the hotline say that I have to go to a store. At the store they tell me that I have to send it by post – just the contract and so on. Why should I send documents by post that contain my ID card number, passwords, address, other contacts and other highly confidential and sensitive information? I will have to call them once more. On Monday, August 31, I went to Vodafone in Trinec.
The staff were very pleasant and professional, and the modem that VF normally sells with a contract for 2,401 CZK was offered to me for 1,377 CZK. The catch was that I have only 14 days to return it instead of 30, and the warranty is only one year, not 2 years. It goes through an employee program, where people working for Vodafone naturally get perks like this from their employer.
That is why at the store I got just the SIM, and 2 days later the modem arrived by post. At first glance you can see it is in a completely different league than the modem for the same purpose from T-Mobile. In the admin interface you can set absolutely everything you could possibly think of, so any network engineer’s, or at least any IT guy’s, heart will leap with joy, but what I like most is the “ordinary” transferred data counter: https://cl.ly/cpbK , which is what I missed most on the T-Mobile box.
Unfortunately, it does not show how much of that counts toward the FUP and how much is always without a speed limit. So I called the VF hotline to ask how much I had transferred within the FUP. Petra told me that websites, email and other services never count toward the limit, and that I had used up 106 MB of my FUP.
Which annoyed me, because the modem’s admin interface showed only 100 MB (and it updates dynamically every few seconds). And supposedly she cannot see how much I transferred via services outside the FUP, because VF supposedly does not count it at all. Yeah, right. The speed should be capped at 8 Mb/s for download and 4 Mb/s for upload; in 3 tests I never measured a lower download, it was even a bit higher.
The upload fluctuates slightly, once it measures 1.8 and then twice more than double that. This is how the first 3 tests I tried turned out: https://rychlost.cz/vysledek/20153476960-75cb/ https://rychlost.cz/vysledek/20153477005-1462/ https://rychlost.cz/vysledek/20153477025-8786/ Upload in particular is terrible on ADSL, and that matters to me a lot.
Overall, I rate both the device and the LTE coverage of Vodafone, even out here in the middle of nowhere, where foxes say good night, as perfect. The only thing I regret is the low FUP, and that they probably count everything toward it, even though they vehemently claim they do not. It would be worth burning through those 30 GB to see what happens, whether they slow down everything. For now, though, I am letting it go.
The official page of this product is: https://www.vodafone.cz/internet/pripojeni-bez-kabelu/
EDIT September 3, 2015: I tried measuring the speed 4 times tonight, when no speed limit should apply to any services; the signal strength was the same, 4/5, so roughly 80%, and I have 3 BTS LTE Vodafone sites around me, all on 900 MHz, which lets me reach a maximum download speed of 20 Mb/s.
This is how it went, one after another: https://rychlost.cz/vysledek/201535257-c69b/ https://rychlost.cz/vysledek/201535258-bde9/ https://rychlost.cz/vysledek/201535259-6e72/ https://rychlost.cz/vysledek/201535277-5741/ Where my phone gets 2 bars of signal, the modem gets 4 bars; in terms of speed you cannot tell much difference, nor in stability and other positive qualities, there is not much left to improve.