Coverage as in reviews, and not service reach, that is. Unlike past service rollouts, Vodafone's HSDPA hasn't seen any real tests in media. Why's that?

We're not sure what Vodafone's PR people are thinking but they certainly make it difficult for us to write anything at all about HSDPA. To provide a fair and balanced review of the service, we have to try out HSDPA and associated devices - naturally.

I attended an early HSDPA demo at Vodafone, where I saw the trial network perform pretty well. That was in April this year and at the time, Vodafone bosses Phil Patel and Jeremy Foster said we'd be able to test drive the HSDPA network under real life conditions soon.

However, months went by and nothing materialised. The HSDPA network went live sometime in July/August, and Telecom got devices from overseas to try it out with. We didn't see any devices despite requests however.

HSDPA got nearer its launch date and Vodafone decided to give away ten devices - the external "Vodems", or USB HSDPA modems - in a promotion. Still nothing for us to review however and we were wondering if there's something badly wrong with the service that Vodafone doesn't want the media to know about.

That was it as far as I was concerned. If Vodafone wants to doesn't want its services and products reviewed, well, that's too bad.

Today however Vodafone's external PR agency rang and said a Vodem would be available. Great, I thought, as I could cover it for the annual PC World broadband feature in the bumper Dec-Jan issue. There have been quite a few readers asking what HSDPA is like and I have no idea at the moment.

The PR person in question says I needed to look over some agreements, sign and return them before she could send out the Vodem though... and I started to read them. A couple of times in fact, because I couldn't quite believe what I saw.

I can honestly say I've never seen any review agreement as painstakingly detailed as the one Vodafone wants us to sign. For obvious reasons, signing such things is a BAD IDEA in general - when we test stuff, it's for real and sometimes stuff breaks. Sometimes however vendors think that we can write reviews by looking at the box and not actually use the products in question, but most see reason once we talk to them.

Vodafone's agreement though takes the biscuit: not only does it strictly limit what we can do with the Vodems, and make us responsible for them, but the mobile operator also wants confidentiality:

2.4 You will keep your participation in the Trial confidential and will not disclose any information in relation to the Trial to anyone (including review articles and magazines) unless required to do so by law.

Errm, right. So, Vodafone: what exactly is the point then?

Anyway, if you were wondering why you haven't seen an HSDPA review yet, now you know. It's not because we haven't tried...