Orange’s Option Icon 2 USB modem is a 44g, 103x46x 14mm USB device that is designed to give mobile professionals a maximum download speed of around 1Mbit/s. The device combines 3G, High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and Edge/ GPRS connectivity and is available through Orange’s £43 + VAT per month Flexible Data 45 plan.

Orange’s 3G service, which covers 92 per cent of the population, is in the process of being upgraded to HSDPA. At present, HSDPA is available in London, the West Midlands, Manchester, Bristol and Merseyside.

Users can lock down the device to use 3G/ HSDPA or Edge/GPRS only, or can set it to 3G/HSDPA or Edge/GPRS preferred. Signal strength and protocol type are displayed on a five-bar gauge. A single white LED stays on when the modem is operating normally. The SIM card required by the modem inserts into a slot on the side of the device, but is not sealed and could be vulnerable to spills and dust.

We checked download speeds from central London and Tottenham, using two different notebooks: a Dell Precision M50 running Windows XP and a Medion Electronics MD96480 running Vista Home Premium. In both locations the signal strength was sufficient to light up five bars on the gauge and never dropped below four. In Tottenham, the average download speed for actual file transfers from the internet was 660kbit/s, and in central London, 415kbit/s. Maximum data download speeds were 1,022kbit/s in Tottenham and 1,048kbit/s in central London.

Besides basic download speed, another key measure of performance is the latency of the service ­ the time it takes for packets to get from source to target when traversing the network. Orange quotes between 80ms and 100ms for the “round trip” latency of its HSDPA service, and when we used the “ping” function in Windows to access Google’s web site, we recorded round trip figures of about 170ms ­ or about 85ms “one way”.

Orange said small data chunks such as 32byte pings would initially be transported at standard 3G speeds and latency, but larger files would trigger HSDPA speeds and latency.

Downloads hung on several occasions forcing us to cancel and start again, but most of the time we experienced no problems.

One worry for mobile professionals could be the notebook battery power used when downloading data through the HSDPA modem. However, we recorded a data transfer rate of 450kbit/s and a drop of only around 10 per cent in the battery power available after we downloaded a 117MB file.

The only other application that is installed during the initial set up is SMS Centre, a small piece of software for sending text messages that features new, forward, reply and delete message functions together with Inbox, Sent and Unsent folders.

The modem’s firmware lacks download usage-tracking capabilities, but Orange said that customers wanting this could buy its Business Everywhere 8 package, which includes a usage tracker as well as deployment management tools, connection and profile controls, and virtual private network integration.