Tagged : WiFi

Huawei E5

Here’s a tip; save your­self some money and buy the WiFi ver­sion of the iPad instead of the 3G model (Thanks to my good friend Stephen McGib­bon for the sug­ges­tion) and buy a Huawei E5 with the money you save. Not only will your iPad be cov­ered for all net­work­ing even­tu­al­i­ties but so will all your other WiFi enabled devices.

I bought one from my local 3 Net­work store in Linz as I have a data plan with them in Aus­tria. The unit was sim-locked to the 3 Net­work when I picked it up but a quick down­load from DC-Unlocker and 15 Euros later I had the thing unlocked and work­ing with all my sims.

I’ve been using the E5 for a cou­ple of days and its an amaz­ing piece of gear. You can use it as a stan­dard 3G modem by teth­er­ing it to your PC or Mac. Or you can use it unteth­ered, con­nect­ing to it over WiFi.

After exper­i­ment­ing with the var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions I found that using it unteth­ered worked best for me. I would also rec­om­mend skip­ping the client side soft­ware install. The device boots up with a 192.168.2.1 address so once the WiFi is turned on (Press and hold the ‘wifi/wps’ but­ton above the power but­ton until the blue ‘W’ indi­ca­tor lights up) you can man­age every­thing through the browser interface.

Don’t for­get to change the default pass­word and set your own (Strong) WPA key. You’re going to use this in pub­lic spaces so keep­ing the bad guys out is a good idea.