An Old Forum post of mine detailing GPRS connectivity with a series 60 phone & bluetooth, originally posted here
Right, here is a short tutorial to get your gprs connectivity on your computer using your nokia phone and bluetooth.
Obviously you will need your bluetooth installed and working.
Then you need to configure the Bluetooth modem,in Windows XP you go to the control panel select “phone & modem options” and select your bluetooth modem. In the advanced tab of your bluetooth modem properties you need to add the following to you “extra initialization strings”
+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”internet”
You need to replace internet with you default APN, it should be “internet” if you are using vodacom.
Once that is done its quite simple, start up your “bluetooth dial up networking” and leave the username and password fields blank. Dial this number *99# (*99***1# for CellC)
There you go, your are now connected via GPRS.
So what can you expect from GPRS?
Pinging the www.vodacom.co.za will look something like this
| Ping statistics for 196.28.100.13: Packets: Sent = 91, Received = 79, Lost = 12 (13% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 550ms, Maximum = 2614ms, Average = 945ms |
Pinging www.google.com something like this.
| Ping statistics for 216.239.63.104: Packets: Sent = 74, Received = 68, Lost = 6 (8% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 776ms, Maximum = 2249ms, Average = 1219ms |
Of course I could just have bad reception, its definitely the radio side of things messing around. Although a quick look at my phone tells me I have full reception.
OK, so obviously latency is not really your concern if your on GPRS, however speed still plays a factor so here goes.
The local Telkom speed test gives this answer (500kb file)
| Your line speed is approximately 11.7 Kbps or 1.4 kBytes/sec |
The International Stanford test gives this.
| Oops, it won’t work. Packet loss is not my friend, seemed to die on the outbound test though, will try again. I did do a int’l download which came in at about 1.2 Kbytes/sec |
OK, so its nothing special, but still great for that quick e-mail download when your company sends you on one of those team building missions in the middle of nowhere.
I could probably stick my phone out the window and get better results but then again I don’t think anyone wants to run around looking for a better “spot” so this is pretty much what you can expect. Also the tests were done just after 8pm which would be peak time for the network.
Anyways just thought with the new tariffs some people might be interested, besides the 3G modem is still a bit expensive and GPRS works fine for a mobile solution.
If you would like to get an idea of the costs click here