Internet on the go

How does Samba mobile broadband perform?
 If you remember, I said I had joined Samba broadband.
This is a clever idea of theirs.
The company sells you a sim or a sim and a dongle.
You watch adverts on line and the adverts earn you megabytes. Each advert is 3.5 mb.
You can top up with money if you think you would run out but the money top ups are for 30 days straight . The advert megabytes last until you use them. I had just over 1.5 gigabytes in 21 days of membership.

We took several unlocked dongles with us. Samba uses 3 network in the UK.
I used a lot less than I expected due to the enormity of our task and the lack of time. In all,I only used 289 megabytes. This was mainly emails, a few small surveys and some general browsing,I did watch some short videos on nectar adpoints too. I used a Hi link Dongle that can work at 21mbps.

However,despite the comfortable feeling of being able to stay on line, I was disappointed to find that Samba adverts are almost non existent when connecting through their sim.
 I had only one advert for most days and 2 on one or two days.
That meant that although the adverts watched while using the dongle did not deplete the amount I can use, they were pitifully inadequate if I had needed to have more than the small amount of web access I actually used.

If I had only been able to access via the dongle for say a month and we had not been so busy, I would have probably run out with my only option being to top up with money.
 I suppose that one could go into burger restaurants or any of the other places where you can surf with their wifi while drinking a cup of tea and watch the adverts there, to be sure of getting enough to keep your account topped up when no wifi is available but it would need some dedication and determination.

Students would no doubt find this useful and for the very few times that we will need mobile broadband,so will I.
When we stayed at the youth hostel,broadband access was 50 pence for 30 minutes which seems expensive,I would use Samba in preference to that.

They could improve the idea enormously if they had a mobile phone page in which the adverts were accessible as they are on home Internet .
I did try to access their page via my phone browser. UCee browser could access the page but could not view the videos and nor could opera mini or the built in nokia browser(I think based on firefox).

For one thing it is easier to carry a mobile phone with you and you have much more chance of accessing free wifi simply because of the small format.

Secondly, a mobile phone is less alluring to thieves than a laptop would be so turning up in the same spot every day to top up your adverts would be less likely to gain notice .
 I say page rather than App because an App is Operating system specific (unless java or python and still it would rely on a phone being able to handle those languages).
A mobile page can be seen by any mobile browser.

 My other option for internet access was Joikuspot as my phones are all Nokia and that is a Nokia specific app as far as I know. This app worked perfectly although I hardly used it. It was very useful before I got the dongle to see the Samba sim and still go to the log in page (it needed to restart) . I used it a couple of times when I wanted something very quickly rather than find the dongle and let it start up.

My poor DD was about a week without Internet due to having to end her agreement when moving. DH had his phone for tethering (we discovered it is allowed on his tariff ,else he would have used my options).