USB Modems - simple as 1, 2, but not ‘3′
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008You pay £100 for a modem from ‘3′. Read the box “System Requirements… Mac OS X” and “Features.. Auto installation and easy to use” All you have to do is to plug it in and away you go, right? Not if its a Mac!
It seems that ‘3′ charge £100 for PAYG broadband dongles and cannot be bothered to put the Mac drivers on a CD for the Mac users.
Wait, there’s more… inside on the instructions they say, “For Mac OS X software.. visit three.co.uk/usbmodem to download mac drivers and installation guide.”
OK, seems simple to me.. just go online and download the drivers. Errm.. hang on a minute, did I read that right.. “visit three.co.uk/usbmodem to…” They want me to go online and download.
How dumb can ‘3′ be? That’s why the modem was bought in the first place!
So now I have to find a pc and the page to download these Mac drivers. I went to three.co.uk/usbmodem and the page changes to something else.
No ‘3′ I don’t want to buy another stupid b/b dongle as I already bought one and would like to use it TODAY on my MAC.
Oh, yes.. I did a search for “e220 mac drivers” while I was there and found that ‘3′ never heard of it.
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No reference to it. What? So, where are they?
Orange leaflet.. “three.co.uk/usbhelp”… which brings me back to the same page.
Eventually, after a Google search, I found the drivers on a blog and Huawei’s own website. But when I tried downloading them from Huawei.. I got an unknown file. Unknown? Maybe I was using the wrong browser, so I tried it with IE. Sure enough. Not only did Firefox not allow me to login to My3, but didn’t download the .iso file.
To save you the hassle I went through, here are the drivers for the Huawei E220 Mobile modem.
Don’t use Firefox to download drivers
This is the PDF for powermacs (G4) OS X
Config Guide USBModem Mac. PDF
One day these companies will get a bright innovative idea to make life easier for their customers and thus, not only attract new ones, but keep the ones they’ve got already.
5 hours later… and i’ve gone to three.co.uk to seek out these mysterious mac drivers/software ‘whatever’. Amongst all that advertising USB Dongles there’s a button “more info” - you’d think that would be for more about the products. Then on the right, after clicking it… “mac software drivers” - I have to pinch myself. Hidden away on 3’s website are the drivers. All under the heading:
What is Mobile Broadband?
Well, I now know the answer to that one! On ‘3′ in Hulme it’s slow download speed, seeing that they boast in ‘Turbo Speeds’, and a lot of hassle with hard to find mac drivers and you need another Internet Connection to download them. Do me a favour. Up to 2.8megs .. the speed today was 0.5 MB. In fact, the upload speed was faster at one stage than the download speed. Source was www.speedtest.net & Sunrise ADSL.
They should change the term for 3 from ‘Turbo speed’ to ‘Slow trickle’.
Then i go to three.co.uk/my3 and find that they send a “text message” with my “password” on it.. What planet are they on? They know very well that the dongle on a mac cannot receive text messages. Unless they are on my3 then I’ll just have to login with the password they send me by text. Dumb, dumb, dumb..dah-de dumb.
Is this a too harder thing to ask for that ‘3′ make it easier on their customers and that we have the speed we paid for? When they say “up to 2.8MB” I at least expect it to be over 1.5MB and not .5!!!