Telstra Turbo USB 3G Modem

Telstra's latest foray into the pre-paid mobile internet arena is what it dubs a "Turbo" USB Modem. It comes at something of a price premium to the USB modem that Telstra's previously offered — at $179 to the older model's $129 upfront cost. That's actually well in line with the industry averages for USB 3G modems off contract, for what that's worth. That extra fifty bucks doesn't change the costs of data, but it does open up higher speed possibilities. The modem itself is a Sierra Wireless 7.2MBps USB 301 model, but Telstra's at least realistic about its data claims these days, with stated download speeds of 550Kbps to 3Mbps. The marketing hype does describe 500Kbps as "blistering" speed. I can't quite equate that with "blistering", but perhaps your standards are different. Telstra's mantra with NextG has been rather predictable over the years. As a data source, it's been tough to beat in terms of quality, with most tests giving it a clear advantage in the country and city over its rivals. But it's equally been easy to attack in terms of pricing. NextG isn't cheap and never has been. Users of pre-paid services are, typically speaking, chasing that exact inexpensive price point, either to put a solid budgetary cap on their expenses, or because the issues involved with a monthly service fee are beyond their price comfort zone. Telstra supplied me with a 30-day trial unit of the Turbo Modem preloaded with 6GB of data. That'd normally cost you $100 for the data with a 30-day expiry period, although unused quota does accrue if you recharge again within the 30-day period. It's still an expensive exercise compared to Telstra's 3G competitors, but in some areas you won't get anything but Telstra signal, so "competitors" may be a little bit of a moot point. Installing the Turbo Modem was, to put it mildly, an interesting experience. On the purely physical side, while I appreciated the fact that the USB cap is held in place with a miniature lanyard — so you can't lose it no matter how hard you try — the modem itself is thick and chunky, and directly inserted it'll block both ports on a MacBook quite easily. That chubby size does allow both the SIM and a MicroSD card to slot in just above the USB plug, making for easy insertion or removal. Size was only a minor problem, however. Out of the supplied review box, the modem software simply didn't work all that well. Telstra uses a branded version of Sierra's 3G Watcher software, and that installed just fine under Snow Leopard. It even dialled in and said it was connecting to Telstra, but it resolutely failed to pass a functional IP address through to the Mac itself. Not so much use. After a certain quantity of hacking and a certain quantity of questionable language, I was able to get it working by setting up a new 3G modem interface in System Preferences > Network, but that's less than ideal for what should be a plug and play product. Chatting with Telstra's technical support, it appears that the very early 7.2Mbps modems shipped with a client that's not Snow Leopard compatible. Any build of 3G Watcher later than version 2354 should be Snow Leopard compatible, and that build's easy enough to download from Sierra's web site. According to Telstra representatives, the new build should be on all commercially sold modems, which hopefully should make it a non-issue. Then again, if the client wasn't updated on review hardware, there's still potential for problems. The new client still hit the same problem on the original MacBook I was testing on, presumably due to a preferences file littering the system somewhere. Setting it up fresh on a fresh system — a late 2009 MacBook, for what that's worth — it was all plain sailing. Installation glitches aside, the one thing that the Turbo modem did deliver was speed, and a fair chunk of it. Network data can be quite a variable beast, and once you add the variety that mobile signals have it can be very tough to "state" an average connection speed. I tested using Speedtest.Net under Safari connecting from two locations in the greater Sydney area and hit an average connection speed of 3.5Mbps download and 2.1Mbps upload over a dozen tests. That's very respectable for a mobile connection. There is a sting in the tail here, of course. Getting data faster is very nice indeed, but you're hit for both uploads and downloads, and the faster you get your data, the faster you go through the rather costly data download packs.