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I’ve been in Italy for two weeks now and my notebook hasn’t seen a network cable since for Internet connectivity. While I’ve been desperate when it came to finding an Internet connection during this year’s 3GSMWorldCongress in Barcelona due to the prohibitive pricing of Spanish operators for 3G Internet access, Italy is the true leader of 3G Internet connectivity!At least two operators in Italy offer 3G wireless Internet access for their prepaid customers. I’ve bought a prepaid SIM card from WIND, and activated the Mega No Limit. For 30 euros I got 5 Gigabyte (!!!) of data a month. I’ve been trying very hard to get anywhere near this limit in the past two weeks but despite being online for about 15 hours a day for company Intranet access, web browsing, blogging, podcast and videocast downloading, etc. etc., I haven’t managed to get beyond 900 MB yet.I was a bit scared at the beginning as in other countries I am quite used to having only a small volume for an affordable price which should not be overstepped. I still do have this feeling at times and I keep checking the remaining volume for the month. However, it keeps decreasing at just the rate my mobile phone shows on it’s internal counter as well. These days, I just use the 3G Internet connection like I use my ADSL line at home. 40 MB video podcast? No problem, ‘save as’, and off I go.

UMTS offers a top speed of around 400 kbit/s. When I used the offer for the first time when I was in Italy about one and a half years ago, I always got this speed whenever I started to load a page. Times seem to have changed a bit as the network has become much more loaded these days. Most of the time the speed is lower when I start do download something and only increases after a little while. Especially in the evening hours, I usually do not get this top speed at all. While this could be because the base station also servers many other Internet users it could also be that the voice traffic in Wind’s UMTS network has increased over the past 18 months. It’s difficult to tell and it’s probably a bit of both. But what’s for sure is the fact that UMTS networks in Italy are definitely not idling around anymore producing hot air only.

In the picture on the left you can see the equipment I use at the moment. My bridge to the (Internet) world is a Nokia N93 which acts as a wireless modem for my PC. Good it has a handsfree mode because it happens quite often that I get a call while it is connected to the PC. Quite nice to be on the phone and browse the web simultaneously.