Webs without Wires: 2000 — Present
Posted on May 20th, 2008
Getting online while out and about has always been a fascination of mine. Since my phreak days in the 90s I always wanted an acoustic coupler for my 386 laptop. I had to settle for a beige box instead.
Then in 2000 I discovered the true freedom of wireless Internet access. My senior year of high school I was the proud owner of the first generation Compaq iPaq, one of the first devices to run the Pocket PC operating system. I also had a pretty spiffy Sanyo phone on Sprint. Both devices had serial cables available so with a simple null-modem adapter to couple them together I could dial-up the wireless web and get blazing 9600 baud speeds, great for telnet and IRC!
Let me tell you, 2G wireless net access was–like the kids on the short bus–slow. At a time where 3 Megabit broadband cable and DSL has just started to pop up in my area the thought of going back to anything rated in baud was painful.
Painful albeit consistent and easy to setup. Getting online was as simple as installing the modem driver and creating a dialup networking profile. The most difficult part was obtaining the driver which was typically found burried deep within on the handset providers web site. But once you had that a simple ADTD to #777 with username web, password web you were ready to rock!
The 2.5G days were just as easy. When Sprint rolled out their 1xRTT network, dubbed Sprint PCS Vision, I was absolutely ecstatic. The prospect of connecting at up to 144Kbps was amazing and to this day I feel is a sufficient fallback from EVDO.
Things started to fall apart when I moved to 3G in 2005. The promise of Verizon’s EVDO network with speeds to up 2.4Mbps was too good to pass up so I switched from Sprint.
By this time I had gone from my “dumb” Sanyo to the Treo 650 (palm) and now the Treo 700w. I was pretty stoked to get on the Windows CE, I mean Pocket PC, I mean Windows Mobile platform. Considering the great time I had geeking out with my Compaq iPaq 5 years prior the Treo 700w should be a cakewalk right?
But alas the cake is a lie. Pocket IE doesn’t seem like its changed in 5 years and the OS was made for a pen, not a phone. Regardless all I really cared about was making calls, messaging and tethering for Internet access. And now with bluetooth I’d have the freedom of true wireless mobility!
So I modded my eee PC — added an internal USB port and bluetooth dongle. The bluetooth dialup networking setup is pretty straight forward and the lack of messy cables is quite convenient but the consistency is truly lacking. I’m frequently disconnected and often must restart both devices. The EVDO speeds are nice but the bluetooth connection adds a nasty bottleneck.
When it comes to tethering over USB Verizon missed the boat. Then again tethering had always been somewhat of an underground practice but by now the notion of getting online through your phone and laptop had hit mainstream.
When the Treo 700w shipped it was lacking DUN capabilities. This wasn’t really an oversight on Microsoft’s part since DUN had always been in Windows Mobile, rather the age old story of the telco disabling all the fun features while they figure out how to monetize ‘em. When the 1.2 firmware was released for the 700w about the same time the 700wx came out they had figured out how to do just that.
This tiny little utility called ModemLink allows you to turn the phone into a USB modem. You have to toggle the capability on and off–you can’t active sync while it’s on. I figured I’d give it a spin since the bluetooth connection was driving my batty and low and behold Verizon wants more moolah for the bits. Pings don’t go through (I typically keep a constant ping going to keep connections alive) and all HTTP requests are redirected to a page trying to upsell the tether service.
WTF I thought, connecting to the EVDO network through my phone had always been part of the deal. Sure the game changed a little when Verizon changed their wordage from “Unlimited” to “5 GB/month” and that seems fair but come on, I can connect via bluetooth or through the devices browser anyway, now ya want more hard earned technobux for bits over USB?
Ah but there is a workaround. There’s always a workaround 
The talented programmers at June Fabrics sell an inexpensive dialup networking alternative for Palm and Windows Mobile called PDANet. The later version works in conjunction with Active Sync and bypasses Verizon’s lame upselling campaign. I figure as far as the telco is concerned the traffic is being generated on the device. So at the end of the day if you can sync you can connect. I’ve been getting pretty decent speeds too, about 600Kbps down and 100Kbps up.
Looking forward I really hope HSDPA or EVDO rev. B actually deliver their broadband promises. After doing this wireless Internet access through cell network thing for 8 years now I’ve got to say the best solution is simply an EVDO-WiFi router. Lets just hope my next handset has both chipsets as an access point in my pocket sounds like pwnage.
