I bought a USB dongle in Australia during the summer to be able to access the web using my laptop whilst there. It was bought there from the Australian arm of VirginMobile, and worked great.
I now need to be able to have a similar arrangement both here in the UK and also in Portugal. Not looking for anything fancy - just, say, 1GB/month for the occasional use and at a reasonable cost.
Does anybody know if my dongle will work here/in Portugal with a locally purchased PAYG SIM card, or do I have to buy a new one (or two)?
It basically depends whether the dongle is unlocked or not. You can buy unlocked USB dongles for £20 or so and then you can use a SIM from any network in it (as long as it's an internet sort of SIM of course).
This is what we do for internet access in Belgium, I have an unlocked dongle and we buy PAYG Mobistar SIMs.
I have a couple of these data dongles but if you are in a marginal area of coverage then you need to be tethered by a usb cable with the dongle perched on a window upstairs. Three now have a MIFI adaptor which works like the dongle but provides an interface to the computer by wifi. So you can connect 4 wifi enabled gadgets rather than just one with the usb dongle. You could also put the adaptor in the loft where the signal should be better. The latest model is E585 and you can buy these from fleabay for =A370ish unlocked.
Anyway, I have bought one of these PAYG from the three store for =A350, but you are forced to buy a topup at the same time. If you buy on PAYG you can immediately call their customer service and pay =A315 to have it officially unlocked. At least if its done by them, I am guessing the warranty remains valid?! Well after nearly an hour on the phone, they provided the unlock code and yes it worked with a T-Mobile data simcard which ironically had better signal strength and speed than the
3 network. If you want an unlocked MIFI adaptor with warranty then don't buy it on contract or they won't give you the unlock code until your contract expires. If you buy on PAYG they will unlock it the same day! Odd policy isn't it. Oh and they tried to give me the old model so be sure to only accept the E585.
The easy bit is unlocking the mifi once you have the code. All you do is put in a non-3 sim and go to the unlock menu which is no longer greyed out.
There are three ways to get the unlock code.
1) Ask 3 for it
2) Pay somebody for software to extract it for you. Search for "zibri" for an example, but there are others.
3) Do it yourself. There are instructions on the web. It basically involves using the free demo version of a program called PSAS to read the "EFS" configuration file system in raw format and search for a text string which is just before the unlock code. You can check that you have found the right place by confirming that the serial number is just before the string you searched for. PSAS usually fails to extract the whole file and crashes. It may take a large number of attempts before it works. The mifi sometimes locks up and has to be power cycled or even "factory reset", but it can be done. Search for "mifi unlock pst" for more info.
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