According to Alessandro Speranza, > Hi guys. > I'm writing to ask your opinion on the following. > I've got no phone at home, and I'm thinking about an easy way to connect > my laptop to the internet, at least to read email, when I stay working at > home. My mobile is wap, but I have no cable, plus I have no serial port on > my laptop (presario 700). On the other hand, the other day, I found out > there's this sim card you can stick into a pcmcia connect card and use > gprs protocol to connect to the internet. I'm not sure about the costs of > connection, I'll find out, but for now, I will need some ideas on weather > there's any chance of making the whole thinkg work with linux. Does any of > you have any experience? > If not, does any of you have any alternative idea? > I guess the easiest thing would be buy a gprs mobile phone with usb cable > and use that as a modem, but I've got the same problem: do you know if > that works with Linux? > Cheers > Alessandro
Mobile phone based: I test drove a 2.5G phone from SprintPCS for a couple weeks. They use 1xRTT I think, which and supports data rates up to 144kbps. I expect this is the CDMA equivalent to GPRS, which is the 3G extension to GSM, is it not? The cable I purchaced was a USB cable and the phone turned out to come in as a stanadard (AT command set) modem on /dev/ttyUSB0 (I think). So setting up a pppd connection was quite straightforward. Download performance was typically 100-120kbps, which was not bad, but the latency was very poor (ping times were around 1.5 sec). So for interactive use it was painful. An ssh session was OK, but tightvnc-over-ssh was painful and X-over-ssh was intolerable. Wired options: Are you saying that you have no phone line (actual wire) or that you don't want to have POTS service installed. Recently I was told by my phone company (SBC, formerly PacBell) that I had to have a POTS line before I could install DSL, but when I ordered DSL from a competitor, they said that they could install it on "dry copper" too. Other ideas: If you are within view of someone with a better connection, you might try negotiating a long distance 802.11b connection. See Bob X Cringely's column: "Reach Out and Touch Someone: How Bob and His Binoculars Found More Bandwidth and Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bond" http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010628.html ... and "I Network, Therefore I Am: Further Adventures in the World of Bootleg 802.11b" http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010712.html Enjoy. He's a funny guy. Tony -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
