Using Mobile Broadband in Singapore with Huawey Mifi

How to use mobile internet when visiting Singapore?

I’m currently on holiday in Singapore and I carry around an Iphone, an Ipad and a Vaio (as you do when you’re on holiday). I bought a Mifi device (Huawey E585) a few weeks ago, which means I can create my little Wifi hotspot anywhere I go as long as I have a 3G SIM card.

Starhub sells a pre-paid SIM card called MaxMobile Prepaid. It contains a credit of SGD12.

• You can buy it in any Starhub outlet (they tend to run out of stock at the weekend). You will need to show your passport during registration.
• The SIM card goes into the Huawey (I use the E585) and connects to Starhub network immediately.
• However it’s not operational until you activate the credit. Because you registered using your passport, the only way you can activate the credit is by talking directly to customer care on 1633.
• To identify yourself you will need to quote the 8-digit number that appears on the package of the pre-paid SIM that you bought.
• The lady on the phone will ask how many days you want to activate using your available credit. After she activates it, you will be able to connect to the internet immediately.

To top up your account,

• buy a SGD18 Happy Top-up card from Starhub or Seven-Eleven. 
• call 1633 to credit your account and activate more days.
• You will need to quote your 8-digit SIM identifier as well as the codes that appear on the Happy Top-up scratch card.

I used Starhub with the Huawey without any problem during my stay in Singapore and could connect the IPhone, IPad and Vaio to it.

Self-Defense Techniques

It took me some time before I got to a stable and convenient backup system. I think I got there now. It’s hassle-free, complete and entirely automatic. This is the setup I use now for backup and synchronisation between all my portable gizmos.

1st level

Dropbox to synchronise my essential documents between

• home PC,
• 2 VAIO laptops,
• IPhone
• IPad.

I have less than 2 GB of essential documents so the free version of Dropbox is fine. I find the synchronisation very fast and more reliable than using the Windows offline files feature or Live Sync. This acts as a first form of backup since all files are saved on the Dropbox server by default. Dropbox files are always available offline under Windows. On the IPad/IPhone versions of Dropbox you must manually tick the files to make them available offline. By essential files I mean

• technical Books
• travel documents, flight tickets, travel insurance policy, conference tickets….
• Visual Studio projects
• OneNote files

2nd level

Daily incremental backup on an external hard drive of all documents on my D drive using the backup tool that comes with Windows 7. The drive is a 1TB Western Digital. This protects absolutely everything in case my main drives fail, which is a very likely occurrence.

3rd level

Off-site backup with Mozy, just in case my flat burns or I get burgled. This is an industrial-scale backup: documents, video, raw sound files, VM files, everything gets saved. I currently have 130GB saved on Mozy. At the time I bought the subscription, the backup size was unlimited. No matter how big a video is it will save it, it’s just a matter of time. It took me about one week to finish the initial backup. After that it does very quick daily automatic incremental backups.

I’m happy about this system so far, it’s entirely automatic and very exhaustive.