USB modems being what they are, you might have to remove the dongle from the router every now and then and pop it back in to restart the modem. In theory, provided the USB modem doesn't freeze, if the connection drops the wireless router should handle the reconnects. Most routers are configured using a web browser - no software required on the Mac itself. I'm not familiar with the Huawei E585 but if you buy a battery operated device make sure it continues to work when plugged into the mains (charging) - some don't. Unfortunately most of the dongles UK providers give out for free (or for a nominal charge) are generally of poor quality. For modem I use Option ICON 505 but it's not cheap (around £90). I like the Novatel brand as well for performance. If your mum's comfortable plugging the dongle into the Mac whenever she needs it, or selecting the MiFi network through Airport, plus a few steps to click connect you won't need an always on router.

do they ALL drop the 3G connection if they have no connected clients or those clients are not requiring traffic?

Not by design but if you set up the connection with idle disconnect options it would. The IP address is likely to change after a drop.

A good way to keep track of dynamic IP addresses is to get an account with DynDNS.com and install the update client software on the Mac. It runs unobtrusively in the background and starts up with the OS. I pay $15 per year for the Pro account just to keep my domains alive otherwise it needs a periodical reconfirmation of use by logging in to the account.

Sorry I don't have any direct experience using LogMeIn but that's the sort of the service I would go for. I use MobileMe (Back-to-my-Mac) for this purpose.

Edited by bosie (Sun 01-Aug-10 09:34:45)

is there any chance that the home may have an internet connection?
if its bt maybe they could/have enable a btopenzone wifi on their router.

worth checking for other openzone/fon etc connections nearby too.

(but these will also time out sessions... might need some keepallive packets, and also they have natted private addresses)

OK, so I dropped the 49.99 (plus top-up) on a Huawei E585 (aka Three Mifi) today, and it's fabulous!

I haven't been able to test incoming connections yet, but outgoing is just fine. It seems to hang onto the 3G connection even when the computer is idle (or the time-out is longer than I waited), although it does "hang up" when there are no computers connected. Right now, it's happily hosting mum's Mac Mini, my Macbook Pro, and my iPhone 4. I tried speedtest.net several times during the afternoon and got a consistent 2.4Mb down and 1.4Mb up, which is nearly 3x what she gets with her existing (grandfathered-in) 1MB UKOnline/EasyNet DSL connection. I even tried Skype Videochat to my wife in California and it was noticeably better than on DSL (although used only 29MB for 5 minutes).

It gets a solid 5 bars of HSDPA 3G here in St Albans (where she's moving from). I just hope it works at least as well in Newcastle!

We shall see.

another way to do it rather than /always on/ would be something like wake on sms,
so you send an sms and it starts a comms programs for you.

In reply to a post by simoneves:

|To be honest, the reports I've read so far of the various networks' performance are all universally terrible. I can but hope that only the worst is reported, and that it's not universal. Obviously performance depends on location (which will be fixed).

Not surprising. A tower only has so much bandwidth available and it's shared between everyone within range. That has always been the achilles heel of mobile BB.

Have you thought of the 3 Mi-Fi or a "proper" router like the Draytek Vigor 2820 into which you can plug a USB 3G Modem.

Oops,

just seen your post about this.

Where it hangs up, this is the wifi going into power saving mode.

You can download a non-offical firmware which allows you to disable the power saving

See http://www.shadwell.eu/paul_shadwells_weblog/2010/05... for details.

Adam

We use 3 here and it's an "always on" connection in that the PC is set to redial if it drops. I never turn my PC off anyway.

We have a convoluted setup involving reconfiguring an ADSL modem to 192.168.0.254 instead of 192.168.0.1 enabling the PC it's plugged into to offer Internet connection sharing on 192.168.0.1

All that then needs doing is to fix the router to use 3's DNS servers and use a default gateway of the PC with the dongle plugged into it.

In this respect it's the same as our prior ADSL connection (only much quicker!)

Post deleted by MrSaffron

Try spamming elsewhere, and getting your tables of providers correct first