Boost your mobile broadband speed - DIY!

Matt's blog earlier in the week inspired me to see if I could find any extra hints and tips for you all on boosting your mobile broadband speeds. As I'm not as technical, I instead followed the time honoured adage - Google is your friend.

It's amazing what people spend their free time doing, although I guess doing something productive about slow mobile broadband speeds is certainly better than a lot of less meaningless past times (watching pointless 'celebrities dance and skate, for example). And, no matter how weird it may be, at least these people also have the good grace to share their amazing discoveries with the rest of us via the power of the internet. Although, irony of ironies, some of you on slower connections may have trouble watching the clips in the first place...

While the following may not be quite as practical, I'd like to think that they're more fun! The first I found over at the aptly named Mobile Broadband Blog.

This led me off to  Tech Blogger, which upped the anti from mixing bowls to cooking strainers and tin foil. For the full run down on how to get a strainer to boost your signal, head over to Instructables - yup, with a simple Asian dumpling strainer they were able to pick up a host of new Wi-Fi signals and connect to a network some distance away from their base.

The lesson in homemade foil signal boosters was hosted over at another good tech blog, Life Hacker. Check it out below.

Have you got any top technical tips, or other fantastic broadband uses for kitchen implements? Please let us know, because until the networks pull their collective fingers out, you're our best bet for a half decent signal!