Anyone know how mobile broadband dongles work?

[dennis]

Three do an easy to understan plan. You buy the dongle for £100 and you get 12G to use over 12 months. I am using one to run remote CCTV ATM.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Makes no difference.

I can hear it 'chirping' on te PC speakers, but it still gets stuck at the 'waiting for IP' phase.

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 09:40:18 on Fri, 17 Apr

2009, "dennis@home" remarked:

That's less than half the price it was just over a year ago (then it was £99 for the dongle plus £10/month|1Gig). In the mean time other networks have all been jockeying their prices.

Meanwhile, anyone want a Vodafone GPRS PC-card? Never used, BNIB.

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 09:24:23 on Fri, 17 Apr

2009, tony sayer remarked:

The firm.

[Sarah Brown]

I can confirm that the 3 devices and service support HSDPA.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:

According to my ISP's map I'm out of 3G coverage and have been since I started. I use an external 9dBi antenna on a pole approx 25' high and the signal skims the treetops to the cell tower approx 4 miles away with a hump in the middle. A better antenna would increase the distance. Look at Poynting for a decent Yagi, or

[Jon Green]

Couldn't even get a bloody cell, stuck in the seven-hour tailback on the westbound A14 after an elderly couple decided to do a spot of demolition on the Newmarket services:

[Jon Green]

...or the base station implementers got their end done first, and everyone else used it as a conformance standard. Comes to the same thing, in the end.

Jon

[Brian Morrison]

I know someone that works for Nokia's 3G core software team. Every six months they provide a new release to the networks, each one is full of special code to deal with the latest "don't implement the spec properly" phones, some of which worked on the previous firmware release for the phone but have been broken in the new one. Many of these phones are also made by Nokia, but of course the software in that case is written by a different division.

[Jon Green]

*chuckle* I believe that! It's a bit of a shame that the big wireless manufs can't do a joined-up design approach. Nokia are by no means alone. I've heard similar of others (no names, no pack drill).

Still, I was really referring to first implementation rather than the present situation, but I know that there are bodges at every level in every type of wireless kit now. All hanging together with string and sealing wax.

Jon

[Paul Rudin]

pigeons and read their payload? :)

[Theo Markettos]

Careful! There are two separate issues here:

1. The ability of the dongle hardware to fallback

1a. The ability of the network-supplied dongle driver to fallback

1. The network letting things fallback

1 is very common... I doubt there are any HSPA dongles supplied without GPRS/UMTS capability.

2 however is completely at the whim of the network, and networks do strange things every day to protect their revenues. It's quite conceivable that the network doesn't want you to fallback and has disabled it in some way. They may have implemented this using driver 1a, in which case you can probably work around it. If it's in the network itself, it's trickier.

So it's only valid to consider HSDPA dongles /on the Three network/ if you want to get the full picture. HSDPA dongles on other networks can only prove property 1.

Theo

[Steve Firth]

Why? Is it going to explode?

(mumble) Why are people at Fenland Polytechnical Institute so hysterical about things?

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Jon Green saying something like:

active volunteer with the Memory Club."

Memory Club? Pity he forgot how to drive.

[Tim Ward]

A common approach used to be for the network implementors to make sure their stuff worked with bog standard Nokia phones ...

... and then go into panic mode when confronted with something which doesn't quite understand the specs the same way, and sometimes not exactly what you might call correctly, such as newbie smartphone makers.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No different from early Interop then. Nobodys stack or application talking to anybody else's..and bit by bit the RFCS grew, and things started to work...

I think the issues in this case are that most software expects a fairly rapid IPC response during negotiation, but the way the network works, its a shade delayed. So instead of simply doing nothing and risking a timeout, they juts keep repeating NACKS. until a real connection is established. The price you pay for making something that doesn't do dial, carrier or whatever, act like a modem ..

[Adrian C]

Entered *99# for the telephone number?

[Adrian C]

Whoops, you have ...

[The Real Doctor]

Unlike Three phones, their mobile broadband doesn't roam onto the Orange 2G network. So when Orange see you trying to do a data connection their system simply says - to use the technical term - "f*ck off" and disconnects you.

Ian

[Theo Markettos]

Is this the network recognising the dongle IMEI, or recognising the SIM? I've bought a Mobile Broadband addon using my phone (99p Flat12 SIM from eBay, so not a specific data or anything SIM) and it 'works' on Orange 2G, even using it as a modem.

If they're blocking the SIM and you're on PAYG, the answer would seem to buy a phone SIM and use it in the dongle. You can buy just the same addons as the Mobile Broadband SIM (in fact you can buy more, because you can buy the data-on-my-phone Internet addon which apparently they block from dongles). I think the plain phone SIM should support HSDPA so there shouldn't be any speed difference.

Theo