[Ti] Titanium/Cell Phone/Internet Service

[Steve Wozniak]

At 5:17 PM -0700 2003.04.16, Vance Eschenburg wrote:

>I think I should clarify my needs a bit. I currently have no home internet access. I'm a grad student who moves around every few months so signing a 1yr contract for a high speed access would be impractical. I use my wireless card at school, but I'm interested in still having internet access regardless of where I am. Having access to email only is insufficient. I need the full internet package. What do the road warriors use?

GSM phones are one option. The Sony/Ericsson T68i is very popular for this. It's small, and has bluetooth (no wire to your TiBook), IR, color screen and GPRS ability.

Some carriers (Cingular, T-Mobile for example) allow you to dial modem-style calls over GSM. The rate is 9600 baud and you are billed by minutes of connectivity. Use Internet Connect (Apple's PPP dialing program) with OS X. You set it up to dial your ISP. I suspect that you can use Remote Access and an IR script with MacOS 9.

Most carriers (Cingular, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile) allow you to use the higher speed GPRS (about 45Kbaud transfer rate). But you pay per megabyte, and if you plan a lot of usage, it costs a lot. You may have to get GPRS modem scripts for the phone - I'm not sure if the built-in scripts cover this usage. Again, you use Apple's standard PPP dialing programs, but the name/password and phone number to dial vary by carrier and can be hard to determine, even with the carriers' [usually] worthless customer, sales and technical support.

After connecting through your phone, you can share this connection with others nearby. Just turn on AirPort sharing (Create an AirPort Network), but I have had mixed results doing this.

Also, I know one person who has a T-Mobile family plan where calls between family plan phones are free. He uses one phone as a modem to his laptop, and a second phone as a modem to a computer at home, set up to answer data calls. With this setup he has free data connection (unlimited minutes or megabytes) at 9600 baud. I plan to do this as an experiment soon, but haven't had time to get around to it yet.
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Regards,

Steve  (is tv wake zone?)