Taxi Driver Online

Fellow cabbies, just purchased a netbook. Trying to learn web design inbetween driving the local inebriates at night. Before I start trying my local wifi hotspots, do I actually have to go into the hotspots establishments? Can I not park outside them and work away in my car?

cheers.

Hot spots are a pain in the arse.
The signal can be crap inside, never mind outside. Coverage can be very patchy.
You also need a password for most of them.
Get a mobile sim card (and a dongle if you need one) and save yourself a lot of grief.

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Brilliant Gusmac. great advice, cheers.

You should be able to bounce your mobile phone to it as well to act as a modem, so if you get an all you can eat data package on the phone you are the hotspot 100% of the time, hth.

I've got a two-year contract with 3 which costs £27 per month and provides:

- unlimited mobile broadband bandwidth;

- 2,000 voice minutes;

- 5,000 3 to 3 voice minutes;

- 5,000 texts;

- A Galaxy Ace smartphone which also acts as the modem.

So basically this covers all my internet and telephone needs.

The main downside is that 3's coverge isn't so good outside urban areas, so check before you buy. However, it's usually adequate from home or from the ranks that I sit on, so that's OK.

It's not quite as fast as standard broadband either, but if you're intending using a standard home broadband package rather than what I do then it won't matter so much, because you'll have to use a mobile package in the car anyway.

But a combination of slow speed and the netbook's capabilities means that it can be annoyingly slow in the car at times, so don't plan on wathching lots of stuff on YouTube or the iPlayer in the car, unless you download them before watching.

On 3 with unlimited data, can't say I get buffering on stupidtube, but I always sit where I get a strong signal. Remember if you use phone as WiFi hotspot your battery won't last long.

It certainly does pull the battery down, but if you go out with a full charged phone and don't use it much for other things then it should at least last long enough for your shift, unless you've got an extraordinarly longlife netbook battery and/or don't do much during your shift other than surfing the internet.

Incidentally, another advantage of using the phone rather than a modem is that it doesn't pull the netbook battery down nearly so fast.

I'd say I get 50% longer using the phone rather than a 'dongle' modem because the latter gets its power from the netbook, and seems to be quite power-hungry. So if your netbook's battery is likely to be a limiting factor then it's better to use a phone for 'tethering' rather than a modem plugged into the netbook.

Unless of course your phone's battery is the limiting factor

In car charger

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In which case it isn't the limiting factor

my android HTC desire phone can be a wifi hotspot itself, and tether a laptop to give internet access

ive done this in Bude, North Wales and Somerset so it does work

you can couple the notebook to the phone via cable, wifi of bluetooth

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