The story of the Option card is a bit more involved than previously conveyed. It's not really my option card that went south, but that of my partner. We are three partners, each with a 3G card. One of the partners had problems with his card right from the outset, whereas the other two worked fine. Initially I thought that was my partner using it incorrectly. He kept on complaining and I eventually swapped cards with him when investigating the problem (since I'm the one looking after the IT needs of our practice). By doing that, I discovered that his card was faulty. Vodacom immediately and without any hassle, exchanged the card, but unfortunately (in my opinion) with a Novatel card. Since I gave by partner my Option card, I'm now stuck with the Novatel one (he'll never be able to use the Novatel card because of all its issues). Long story short – it's not my Option card that broke, but that of my partner, and in actual fact, it did not broke, but was faulty from the start. The problem was that it would not get any GSM signal. Initially it would get a signal one out of say four times of continuous inserting and removing it, but the problem got worse and eventually it simply did not get any signal.
I haven't tried the card on another laptop – don't think the odds of getting two faulty cards in succession are that great. But more importantly, it's such a hassle to change from the Option to the Novatel card, as it appears that the software (dashboard), needs to be removed and re-installed as well. (And I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but I'm quite sure (after this happening more than once) that the removal of the dashboard software, messes up the internal Wireless LAN software/drivers on the laptop to such an extent that it needs to be re-installed afterwards as well.