Vodafone Vodem on Vista

It's great to have all those wireless options. It makes you much more flexible with regards to choose where you work and when you work.

Vodafone is offering their "Vodem" as one of the options for wireless data connectivity to the internet. In that sense they provide a tool for more agility. And that's the only reason I include my comment in this blog.

Officially the Vodem is supported on Vista, but in practice there are a few issues.

1. It doesn't seem to like some screen savers. I can deal with this by trying different ones.
2. It doesn't like AnyDVD, which is ok, too, as I can simply switch it off temporarily.
3. It doesn't like Hibernate. I don't like this one particularly as I don't want to reboot the machine each time I want to connect to the internet via the Vodem.
4. Sometimes it just stops working.

In any of these cases it still claims to be connected to the network but when you do an nslookup it can't find any server. Then you have to reconnect it, and restart "Vodafone Mobile Connect Lite" (Lite on what? Quality?)

Overall I have the impression that the quality of the drivers and firmware needs some serious improvement. With my previous data card I had similar issues under Windows XP and it didn't really improve in the long run.

Then I turned the Vodem around and read Huawei and "Assembled in China". I wonder whether the people at Huawei and/or Vodafone are proud of this product.

Bottom line, Vodafone's Vodem works to some degree on Vista but it is very flaky and they have still a long way to go until the reliability is where it should be. So if you are considering it for your team then you may want to give it a trial for quite some time before deciding on a full roll-out.