Singtel's 512K mobile broadband is faster than Starhub's 2MB cable!

This really puts Starhub's Maxonline to shame. I have been hitting 40k-55k consistently when downloading, as compared to the 20k-30k that Starhub is giving me. That's 2 or 3 times faster than Maxonline, even though Maxonline is supposed to have 4 times the bandwidth... I'm so not getting my money's worth out of Starhub!

Ok I signed up for Singnet's mobile broadband on Monday and it was activated on Wednesday morning before 9AM. The connection is stable and fast enough that I can surf on the bus, watch videos on veoh, play ikarium, even download BitTorrent.

Let's compare the prices:
Singnet's 512K mobile broadband is $11.21 a month (12 month free for a 24 month contract) and gives reliable speed of 50k. There is a 50GB quota per month, but I'm not sure if it is for download only or download + upload.
Starhub's 2MB cable broadband is $26.96 (10% off for 24 month contract) and sucks at only 25k. It will be difficult to hit 50GB a month even if I leave my comp running 24/7, so what if there is no 50GB cap.

Yup, Starhub's 2MB plan is disgustingly slow. So slow that their staff expressed surprise when I asked them some question about adding a router. The response is why-on-earth-will-anyone-want-to-share-a-connection-when- it-is-already-so-slow which really surprised me given that I have used a 1MB link from Singnet and found it to be good enough for me. Now I know. It is way below what is advertised.

When my Starhub contract expires, I'm just going to take 2 mobile broadband plans for Sunshine and me, and give up our fixed line broadband. Singtel is not the friendliest ISP around, but they do give the speed that you are contracted to get.

The day I paid $55 for a spare charger

It is said that generic adapters and adapters meant for portable dvd players can work for the EEE PC. But when you dare not use a 3rd party accessory, you have to pay a premium for ORIGINAL parts, right? As much as double the price that you would have to pay for alternatives.

So I bought a spare adapter from the Asus service centre at 4th floor of The Adelphi, opposite Funan. At least I know that this is guaranteed to work without frying my laptop, considering how careful they were not to sell me the wrong charger. I had to produce my SERIAL number, not just my MODEL number, so that they can be sure the charger is suitable for use with my battery. Mine is one of the earlier pieces with battery capacity of 5200mA. It has since shrunk to 4800 and 4400, which probably means they have to cater for 3 different adapters even though this is still the 701 model.

At least I have the reassurance that the adapter will not die within 3 months (the laptop is a year!) and that it will not fry my motherboard. But it is worrying in that if I were to buy a newer model next year, it probably is not supposed to use this spare charger that I'm buying today. This reminds me of how Palm intentionally changed their sync cables such that you will not be able to use the cable from your older model. So no thanks for faithfully supporting them and sticking to them.

Now that I have a spare charger in the office, I can travel a bit lighter when I go to work and not ever have to worry about the battery running flat. I also found a spare mouse. I'm still considering whether to buy a 4GB SD card (or 8GB? *drools*) and I can leave my portable hard disk at home. Pay a bit more to be a bit more mobile. Pay a lot and I can be very mobile indeed.

Million Blog List

Are you listed? I'm #497.

Nokia wifizone

I finally got the chance to take one of the buses that Nokia has equipped with a free wifi network. I failed to join the network on the first day, but could surf the net on the second day.

First try
Using my eee pc, I was able to detect more than 10 wifi networks coming from the HDB blocks around me, but just could not find the Nokia WifiZone despite refreshing several times. I carried on with my ebook reading.

Second try (10 min later)
I finally saw the Nokia WifiZone but failed to get a DHCP lease. Hence, not connected.

Third try (10 min later)
Reconnected and joined, but could not go anywhere, not even google. If you can't even reach google or delicious, or connect to msn or google talk, you are pretty much screwed right? The address given to me starts with 192.168. and the DNS server is 202.65.247.152. I couldn't reach it. Was it too far away?

Fourth try (4 days later on the same bus)
I could log on to google talk, msn messenger, replace my twitter badge on my blog with the latest version that works, twittered via instant message, played Ikarium for a while and didn't have enough time to post this while on the go.

Fifth try (anoter 4 days later)
Good enough that I can post this on the bus. How useful is this free service really? Is it like oh since I'm in luck and on a wifi bus, I might as well try to surf the net and waste some time on this long bus journey? So yeah it works but don't depend on this if you're a net junkie since free wifi services are notoriously unreliable. In the worst
case, it could just be a waste of time and battery charge trying to connect! I'm better off writing or reading something on my eee. It's as bad as wireless@sg in that you can't do anything about it if it is not working, short of changing another bus or going to another fast food outlet. Changing to another bus hardly seem feasible. Download speeds are comparable with wireless@sg, and it's as free.

One difference from wireless@sg: I don't need to sign up for a free account with my IC and don't have to log in with my password everytime I'm using the free wifi (having to log in again is an inconvenience when moving around and changing base stations). I just need to click 2 buttons to indicate that I accept the terms and conditions (which nobody reads).