[AusNOG] [Oz-ISP] Cisco 3G WIC with Australian 3G providers?

[Ross Wheeler]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2008, Skeeve Stevens wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> I have a customer with a site emergency. some retarded fellow at Commander
> Centre put through an order which cut off a customers DSL service (converted
> it to OnRamp).  It is outside Sydney and I am not exactly sure what 3G
> coverage is there. I will investigate that later, but I am suspecting NextG
> or Optus only.
>
> But that said.  Does anyone have any experience using the new Cisco 881 with
> 3G or a 1841 with 3G WIC card. and.. what 3G providers have worked or
> miserably failed.
>
> I do know that NextG has massive inbound restrictions, so using it for a
> temporary mail gateway is not going to work.. too many application gateways
> or something. but in this case the customer would be doing an outbound IPSEC
> or PPTP (normal Tunnels need source/destination IP's).
>
> Anyone got any thoughts?  If I figure this out, I would probably keep the
> kit in our library for emergency situations like this.

I know you specifically said cisco, so this may not help you.

I inherited a customer in an almost opposite situation - they had a 
telstra 3G wireless broadband dongle thingy plugged into a Draytek (2900G 
I *THINK*) as the gateway to a production server.

It DID allow ssh, smtp, http and several other protocols IN AND OUT.

Latency was HIGHLY variable. Sometimes quite usable, most of the time 
unusable (up to 17 seconds), which is why it was ultimately replaced with 
a 512/512 dsl service.

If you want, I still have access to the site, can check more details?

RossW