John Linton .......much lower cost than last year and considerably faster.
We landed at Heathrow at 5.30 am UK time today after an uneventful flight and picked up our hire car and drove West along the M4 with no real plans for the next ten days. We stopped off for an 'English' breakfast in a pretty market town off the motor way and using memory found a remembered place and once again discovered the difference between English straight from the farm food and everything else. We used the time over breakfast to select a hotel and then booked it and persuaded the nice person who answered the telephone to allow us to check in early (it was only 8.00 am at the time) and anyone who has travelled knows that check in time is usually after 2 pm as well as giving us a hefty discount on the advertised room rate which, once again, any semi-experienced traveller knows is always possible.
Our hotel was on the fringe of the old Roman town of Bath and after a shower and a change of clothes we walked in to the centre of the city and re-acquainted ourselves with the amazing remains of the Roman bath complex and its associated temple and then wandered around some of other attractions of the city. We also stopped to buy an HSPA service for me and an international mobile sim for Annette -the rates on the international sim were 10 Australian cents per minute to Australian land lines which is much lower than Exetel buys the same rate for our own international roaming mobile services.
I was interested to see how far HSPA modem prices had fallen since we were here a year ago. Last year I paid 100 pounds for a Huawei 169 - this year I paid 35 pounds for the current version of the Huawei 169 and that included 1 gb of data. If you take the 1 gb's value at 15 pounds then the HSPA modem price has fallen 80% in a little over 12 months. It is just the earliest possible indication of just how expensive Australian HSPA pricing is compared to the EU. The modem I got for my 35 pounds was a 14.4 version which I was eager to try out when we eventually returned to the hotel.
I plugged it in and I selected it as the service for my note book and ran some simple tests from our hotel room. I could get over 6 mbps down on a simple speed test and the general 'feel' of browsing remotes sites around the world was much better than the hotel's wifi connection using an ADSL2 landline service. Very early days and not much of a test as Bath is a city and close to Bristol, a much larger city, but I'm looking forward to using the service as we proceed through Devon and Cornwall where the towns are much smaller and our plans are to stay in remote moorland and coastal/island locations.
One thing that surprised me was that Vodafone don't seem to offer 're-charge' services via the web with the very competent sales girl telling me I could get a recharge in over 100,000 supermarkets and other retail chains around the UK. I need to look in to that as it seems really odd to me that an internet service can't be 'topped up' on line. The other thing is the price of 15 pounds per gb on the prepaid plans I was looking at. However it's very early days and I haven't looked at it in any detail.