I was very excited knowing that  there is IM2 unlimited 3.5G internet access which can be paid without having to use credit card. Yep, the service name is IM2 Broom Unlimited. It promises speed up to 256 kpbs and will be reduce to only 64 kbps when we reach  2GB usage volume. The monthly fee is IDR 100,000 and since it’s prepaid we can stop subscribing at the end of the monthly period.

It does look interesting, so the first time I know about this information from my friend Frandi, without any further delay I immediately buy huawei e220 modem online. Then, with master Seno I registered for the service at Indosat Gallery.

Using wireless internet connection, the best modem position to get better signal does matter. At first I only got 3 bars of the HSDPA signal even though the indosat tower perhaps only 150 meters from my boardinghouse… (hmm I’m still scouting for empty spot at Indra’s boarding house which distance is only about 15 meters from the tower ).  Anyway changing the modem position I managed to get 5 bars signal of HSDPA although sometimes it switch to WCDMA. After that, it’s much better when viewing video from youtube.

I use speedtest.net to see broom’s speed from time to time and the result varies but the difference is not really significant the following picture is one of them.

Speed test IM2 3G BROOM

However, it does have problem, yesterday night the signal was fine (at least that was what Mobile Partner showed), but suddenly I could not open anything after excessive access of youtube before. Hmm don’t know what’s the problem but it persisted until I was tired of waiting and decided to watch Big Bang Theory and Weeds instead. I thought somehow may be I didn’t get “access slot” since there were too many user especially  after hearing that many of staffs in my office has  used this service and of course most of them live near my boarding house. I thought OK let’s see what happened in the morning.

4.am I woke up and ta…da…  just to find out that it is still the same, tired of disconnecting the device I just restarted the computer and the connection back to normal and after 2 hours it happened again and again I restarted the computer it went back to normal. hmm the data history data in the statistic tab of Mobile partner (the software bundled with huawei e220) seems to be reset. Is there any better way to solve this problem?  help please … :-$  I don’t want to restart my pc every time it happens.

I just check my usage and it has been 200MB now. I just hope that when the speed is reduced  64kbps access it will be better than GPRS connection that I used before subscribing to this service. Got to go to work, my to do list has already been out of space ….Good Day!

[update]

The 3G connection is not stable here in Kuta, but fortunately the EDGE connection is much more stable, Here is the speed test using EDGE

EDGE connection speed test

EDGE connection speed test

[update]

I have reached 2GB volume Usage actually it has been 2.5GB now. The speed has been reduced and it is almost 40% of the previous speed I got using EDGE. Here is the speed test now.

Reduced speed after 2Gb quota

Reduced speed after 2Gb quota

Overall, after the speed reduced, internet browsing while downloading file such as torrent will be extremly slow. And I have one tips, If you have reached quota nearly 2GB, don’t disconnect your modem, I think our data usage and speed decrease will be updated and applied after we reconnect.