three-web-cube-broadband-box

[Hands0n]

Well it looks kinda cool with all of the blue lights and stuff, but as a home broadband solution is pretty dire.

At best your paying more than £1 per GB of data, which is piped to you at a pretty depressing speed with a hefty ping time, all backed up by Three's legendary CS. So its useless for online gaming, downloading and streaming is out due to the poor download speeds and data cap, so all its good for is browsing ebay and checking your emails. Why would anyone pay £15+ a month for that?

Worth breaking that lot down a little, just for discussion sake.

Broadband has come to mean many things over time, like "unlimited". But put in context against a maximum of 19.2Kbps GPRS then anything that is 1Mbps and above is likely to be considered broadband in mobile circles. I think it is a tad unfair putting any wireless communication up against wideband/fibre cable delivery.

The speeds that I, and very many others, see on Three's network are multi-megabit. It is not at all unusual for me to see 6Mbps and above, with a peak of 13Mbps. All quite respectable. Ping times are the lowest in the mobile network industry (remembering to keep this all in the context of mobile).

Three's CS remains as dire as ever, neither getting better nor worse. However, Three have a Twitter-based UK CS support that has proven very useful to solve the problems that their 333 operation cannot. That said, I see exactly the same kind of complaint made against all of the other mobile networks CS operations and so while it is not any mitigation I think it is fair to say that in terms of CS we're pretty much all in similar boats.

Given the low ping times and high speeds Three's HSPA+ network is more than sufficient to play online games. I have had this tested out by my own gamester who is completely intolerant of network latency ruining his playability. We set the PS3 to the Web Cube and it performed flawlessly.

The biggest drawback with ALL mobile broadband right now is that data caps do in fact persist. The only way around this is to take up Three's The One Plan where no such data caps exist and tether your device to the smartphone.

So whilst there will be those for which the Three network will be of no particular use - and that is equally applicable to all networks - for those where the network does reach then devices like this may indeed be very suitable. Particularly so where the intended use of such a device is quite applicable.