John Linton
We are currently as far West and South as you can get in the UK without standing on the cliffs at Lands End - a tiny fishing port called Mousehole (pronounced Mouzawl) and we are staying at an old hotel at the base of the cliffs. Annette's prepaid Vodafone mobile sim is happily working but at low strength and I'm typing this blog having previously dealt with my email and caught up on sales of our various services as well as watching a few minutes of the baseball highlights from the USA. All with no problems and, as far as I can see, no service idiosyncrasies.
Over the past three days, since my last update, I have used this Vodafone HSPA service in some of the remoter parts of Devon and Cornwall and apart from one overnight stay in almost the centre of Dartmoor I have had few difficulties in business internet use - all but on that one occasion getting a usable signal. I've used the service on the remote North Coast of Cornwall, and now in the far South Coast as well as across Dartmoor and half a dozen places in between. Always usable for web browsing and email and a variety of VPN applications as well as (today) TV streaming from the USA.
The speed tests I've done have twice peaked at around 6 mbps and the lowest I have obtained so far is just under 1 mbps. I won't be able to test speeds above that until we return to London at the end of next week. At the three hotels we have stayed at since the first night the HSPA speed is as fast or faster than the shared wifi connection provided by the hotel. So that's it for the first four days of traveling the remoter areas of two of the less industrially developed English counties. It's a great asset for anyone traveling in the UK and I suspect anywhere else in the EU.
As a comparison I also tested the T-Mobile service I bought last year which has an older and slower version of the HuaWei USB modem and found that it was significantly slower (to be expected as it's rating was 3.6 mbps vs 14.4 mbps) than the Vodafone service but also had far less coverage in the sparsely populated areas we traversed. These random tests don't mean much of course as few people would want to use internet in the places I tried to use it and as a percentage of the total UK market it would hardly register but they are indicative of trends. If I had to buy a 'permanent' service though, there is little doubt it would be Vodafone.
Earlier today we visited the Eden Project on our way from North to South Cornwall:
http://www.edenproject.com/our-work/plants/index.php
and were impressed with much of what we saw - perhaps the hugeness of the scope of the work most of all. It was a touch too 'Glastonbury' for me but I really was impressed with the engineering and the progress that has been made in bringing about some semblance of the original 'vision'. Most of all I was impressed with the founder's ability to get money from both the UK government and UK major industry, though I find it hard to see the association of Rio Tinto (surely one of the planets major destroyers of ecologies and a landscape raper and looter and 'uglifier' of monumental proportions?) as a major donor to such a project.I wonder how much money Rio Tinto donates to ecological projects in Australia?
Perhaps what I liked most of all was the 'motto' at the entrance gate of the project:
"Ordinary People Trying To Make A Difference"
I
think that, somehow, really 'resonated' with me because I believe in it
absolutely and am continually mildly disappointed that more of us 'ordinary'
people don't seem to think that we can make a difference, albeit
small, but a difference none the less and almost always a positive difference. The people who Exetel support in Australia are very dedicated and very passionate and I have little doubt that there are many more like them - but, I don't think there are anything like as many as there are in this country....hopefully I am just displaying my ignorance in reaching that conclusion.
Overall, spending a few hours visiting the Eden Project drove home to me that it was 'just' another example of how much more, and from my experiences and observations, how infinitely better, the national and local governments, commercial enterprises and the people up and down the country join together to protect and regenerate every aspect of their environment and ecologies and how committed so many 'ordinary' people are and how so passionate they are about 'doing their bit' in the multiplicity of ways that are available to them
I wish governments, commercial enterprises and 'ordinary' people in Australia could begin to develop the sort of awareness and co-operation about ecological issues that you see everywhere in this country.