| Netcomm Turbo 7 Gateway added to BigPond wireless broadband range |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Thursday, 07 August 2008 | |
  
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Telstra and Netcomm have done a pretty good job of making installation and set up foolproof. The unit comes with a USB memory stick and lots of warnings not do anything until you have plugged the stick into your USB port, opened the specified file and followed the instructions. On the Mac it installs some software, then opens step-by-step device set up instructions in Safari after following these you're online. The whole process takes about five minutes. Interesting there is no connection/disconnection option. The Connection Manager simply shows you the status of the connection. If you power the device on it will of course disconnect and then reconnect when you power it back on. The 3G technology at the heart of the device comes from Sierra Wireless which also supplies the Next G ExpressCard. Somebody has certainly done a much better job with the software in the Turbo Gateway. On the Mac at least the ExpressCard software is a dog. A really good feature of the unit is that it won't let you create an unsecured WiFi access point (which at Next G's data prices could cost you an arm and a leg if somebody started freeloading on your connection.) The unit comes with wireless protected access activated at startup and a small card carrying the wireless network name (SSID) and WPA ke and instructions to locate the SSID on the device you want to connect from over WiFi and then enter the WPA key. For the technically minded there's an 88 page operating manual included on the USB stick. The gateway will be offered as one of several access products available across all wireless broadband plans: PCMCIA, ExpressCard and USB modems all priced at $299. The existing portable device, a mains powered USB connected modem that sells for $249 will be phased out. The new product will no doubt prove very useful to people in areas where fixed broadband is unavailable or who not in sufficiently settled accommodation to merit signing up for a fixed service and who want to connect more than one device to the Internet (it has four ethernet ports), but multiple devices means more traffic and at the Next G data rates costs could escalate rapidly. 400MB at 3.0Mbps/550kbps will set you back $49.95 and $0.15 for every megabyte beyond this. A 3Gbyte plan will cost $109.95 per month. However, if you are game to sign on for 36 months, Telstra will refund the cost of the modem and charge you only half these rates for the first 12 months. Running a few speed tests at http://www.ozspeedtest.com using the Telstra BigPond Mirror, the best I got was almost 2.7Mbps for a small (600kByte) file. A larger (9Mbyte) file averaged about 1Mbps, but even over a few minutes there were enormous speed variations. My first attempt with a 600kbyte file delivered it at only about 300kbps. |
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