Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

I am considering purchasing an HSDPA enabled phone for connecting my n800 to the net. As T-Mobile offer the best connectivity packages via web'n'walk I was looking through their offerings.

As far as I can see they have 3 options that would do as I wish: -

Nokia n95
Tmobile MDA Vario II
Samsung SGH-Z560

As I understand it .. the Tmoblie MAD Vario II is a Windows Mobile Phone and unlikely to work because they support PAN and not DUN (If I got this wrong please tell me)

The Nokia n95 Nice phone, but a little expensive for my tastes (especially after buying the tablet) but I imagine almost certain to work.

Lastly the Samsung SGH-Z560 seems cheaper and I think has DUN support.

Does anyone have one of the above phones working as a Bluetooth Tether for their n800 via T-Mobile UK ? ...

If so does it work well for you ?
Has anyone done this with a SGH-Z560 ?

Thanks !

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Cant help you with those phones but I connect mine via a Nokia N70 to T-Mobiles web and Walk. The connection wizard sets it all for you. I get about 15k a second downloads over bluetooth. The speed of the bluetooth connection is the speed limiting factor.

Rgrds,
Jon

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Just be aware that the standard Web'n'Walk £7.50/month tariff doesn't permit modem usage so you should in theory be discussing the Web'n'Walk+ £12.50/month tariff. While you can use the £7.50 tariff with your 770/N800 you're breaching the T-Mobile Ts&Cs and T-Mobile could throttle your connection, or worse.

By the way, you might be interested in the Three £5/month unlimited internet tariff: http://three.co.uk/personal/products...s_/add-ons.omp

It's technically the equivalent of the T-Mobile Web'n'Walk tariff but £2.50/month cheaper, and I've heard that Three turn a blind eye to modem usage. But don't quote me on that, they can change their mind at any time! :)

Going back to T-Mobile, what about the Nokia E61 or Sony Ericsson W880i? They're both 3G phones and not too expensive (free on some packages).

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Speaking of T-Mobile and Web'n'walk, I got Web'n'walk and a Vario II last year. The Vario II being less than useful, I eventually sprang for an unlocked Sony-Ericsson M600i and stuck the sim in it. The M600i has one or two quirks (don't use it as a clock!) but it's a decent phone and it works fine with the N800.

(The one thing to remember is that HSDPA phones eat juice like there's no tomorrow. The M600i can manage almost 60 hours on standby, compared to about 30 hours for the Vario II (aka HTC TyTN); but switch the M600i to GSM/GPRS and it'll go for a week. In actual connect time, you want to make sure it times out after only a couple of minutes, or you'll find it's only good for 2-3 hours before you're hunting for a charger.)

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Three UK are launching three new data tarrifs on 3 September according to this article.

These are tethered/modem plans, unlike the existing £5/month plan which doesn't allow modem usage.

If anyone is on the verge of renewing their existing contract it might pay to look at 3 in a few weeks time - I think with the new plans they will offer a better combined monthly voice+data deal than T-Mobile.

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

I note that only the first of those 3 tariffs will be available to add to a handset - the other two will only be available with their USB modem (ie a new contract I guess)...

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

My emphasis :)

The first two deals (£10/month/1GB and £15/month/3GB) will be available for both handset and USB modem, while the third (£25/month/7GB) will be USB modem only (which needs it's own contract/SIM in addition to any voice contract). It's not clear if the £25 deal will ever be available for handsets - the quote kind of suggests it might become available later in the year, depending on how you read it. However £25/month is too expensive for me, and 1GB/month should be enough to feed my N800 - if not, there's always the £15/month option! :)

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

That would be handy- I am already on 3 and have just got a new N73 to replace my old n73. I got £10/month of my contract for being with them a year, so if I put the £10/month back on it I won't miss it (especially as I ebayed the old n73 for £130).

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

I was looking at the three broadband lite £10 deal to use with my Sony Ericsson W950i. It's not an HSDPA phone, but that shouldn't be a problem, should it? What I really want is to be able to connect to my asterisk (VOIP/SIP) server at home and make calls that way, and leave the phone in my pocket. 3G (UMTS) should be fast enough.

The sales-drone in the shop was trying to tell me that you can't use an hsdpa connection with a phone over bluetooth, because bluetooth isn't fast enough. OK, bluetooth has a theoretical max of ~1mb and hsdpa is ~2.8mb, but surely my connection will just be slower over bluetooth?

Has anyone tried this to confirm? Alternatively, the forthcoming Nokia N83 will apparently act as a wifi modem :)

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, as present in the N800, has 3Mbit/s bandwidth, of which up to 30% may be considered overhead, leaving about 2Mbit/s for actual data which should be plenty fast enough for an HSDPA phone.

However the sales drone may have had a point - although the W950i supports Bluetooth 2 it doesn't support EDR in which case the W950i's BT 2.0 bandwidth is around about 720kbit/s. Still a respectable spead though - better than 30-40kbit/s you get with GPRS, or 80-100kbit/s with EDGE! :)

I use my W950i over 3G on O2 (no HSDPA) and it's OK - I don't use it much, because O2 are fleecing bast*rds who charge a fortune per MB. :( Once the 8GB N95 appears on 3, I'll be all over it... :D

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Thanks Milhouse,

I was planning on upgrading my phone soon anyway. If I got a phone with BT2.0 EDR (like the N95) theoretically I would be able to use the full capacity of HSDPA? I think I'll go and get a three pre-pay sim this weekend to play with. I know it's not HSDPA, but it's still better than GPRS :) I work in a mobile software development environment, so I can lay my hands on phones to play with quite easily :)

Thanks

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

You should be able to get the most out of a 1.8 Mbit/s HSDPA connection with the N95, but any speed beyond that (3.6Mbit/s should be common now, and some networks are rolling out 7.3Mbit/s) will be impacted by the Bluetooth bottleneck.

We'll need to wait for a future device with Bluetooth 3.0 or built-in 3G/HSDPA radios to make the most of HSDPA. :(

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Thanks

that sounds like what I expected. The part that seemed unlikely was that the guy was telling me that I wouldn't even be able to connect to the phone over bluetooth, because it's not fast enough. I tried telling him that it would just run slower, but he wasn't having any of it.

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Hi - first post so be gentle!
I'm currently tethering my N800 with a Nokia 6120 using 3's X-series Silver £5 on top of the £15 tariff - free phone, but an 18 month contract.
Getting a 3.5G signal from my desk at work so I get better 3G reception than 2G Orange or Voda!

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Jimbo, what sort of speeds are you getting through the N800? and do you get a direct internet connection or does it go through their stupid proxy which formats the web for a mobile phone? Can you connect to IMAP/POP etc... I tried on of their PAYG sims and all I could use was mobile-formatted web. No email, ssh, etc.. and definitely no VOIP over SIP :(

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Hi guys, I am from UK. I just signed a 3 contract phone yesterday, and add the Broadband Lite package on it for my N800. It is a little bit tricky to setup the internet connection with my new 3 phone Nokia 6120. I used my laptop with the phone via USB cable, and it worked perfect. Then I tried on N800. As you know, when setup phone connection, you will have choice from N800, which country and which operator. At first I used this wizard to set UK 3, but when I use this connection, N800 will connect 6120 via bluetooth, and the phone will initiate 3G connection. But few second late, N800 will display a connection error, something like "remote server int error", and then drop the connection. I tried several times, then I called the 3 customer service. I told them I want use the phone with N800, and could not get through. Then they said, the Broadband service is not designed to work on bluetooth, you can only use with laptop via usb cable. Useless!
Then I had a study from google, tried to find way to configure it manually. And here is the solution, you need to configure the phone connection manually, not wizard. First, pair the phone with N800 on bluetooth, then go to the N800 Connectivity setting.
Connections -> New -> Next -> enter Connection name, choose Packet data -> enter "three.co.uk" as Assecc point name, "*99#" in Dail-up number, and leave others blank -> Next -> Finish

Then try the connection, you would be able connect to the 3G. And the speed is good, much better then GPRS, and you can use skype and email as well.

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

I was looking at this deal, but £25 p.m. is a bit rich for me, as I don't want to make phone calls. I have a work mobile for that. Their site says that they will be launching the service on pre-pay, so I'm going to wait for that. But thanks for the heads-up about connecting :)

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

The ofer from 3 network, pay as yougo 1 month internet is:
- cost: £5
- data cap 2 Gig per month,
- only two ports are open : http 80 and 455 :(
- proxy server and content block:(
Using my SE K608i transfer over bluetooth to N800 is around 30 kb/s max, but if I'm put the simcard to datacard and to WRT54G3g router is 260 kb/s
Then to avoid data cap im holding another sim card and top up if needed

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

the faq's on three's site for broadband llite talk about payg, so it looks like they're planning on launching the open service at some point :)

"Please note: At launch, Mobile broadband is not available for Pay As You Go customers, but it will be available in the future"

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

as you go to:
http://www.three.co.uk/personal/pric..._go_/may_1.omp
you'll find deal for Add Internet Monthly for £5.
I'm using for about 1 month and I recomend as the cheapest way to get Internet in UK. The SIM card cost around £5 for ONE, better TWO in case of reaching data cap -and no question ask in shop (no need of adress)?!? Top up anywere one's a month - ideal for mobile user.

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

I tried a payg three sim a month or so ago, but the fact that the reformatted all the pages kind of defeated the purpose of using it with the n800. That combined with the lack of imap and MS Exchange support means it's a bit pointless. I want something that I can use in my Moto Q9h and which will allow me to sync with my work's exchange server, which my voda 2.5g sim will, albeit slowly

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Three don't reformat pages - had my 770 browsing fine with their £5 a month package via a SonyEricsson P990i.

Can't for the life of me set up my LG KU990 Viewty though :( can anyone offer any insights? I've paired, dialing packet data, *99#, apn=three.co.uk - all much the same as the P990 apart from the dialing string where SEs use their own specific format (*9***x# where x is the DUN profile number) I'm assuming LGs use the standard *99# format? Can't get it to work though and not sure what log files to look in? :(

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

I've documented the process I used for getting the MDA Vario II setup as a bluetooth modem on the N800 here. It works well, however being a Windows Mobile device there's an inherent instability in both the bluetooth and 3G stacks which means that, although I can generally make a connection from the N800 without having to take the phone out of my pocket, about 1 in 4 times I need to restart one or both of the phone and bluetooth stacks to get a connection.

T-Mobile's service is generally good, 3G coverage acceptable and the £27.50 web and walk tarriff is frequently discounted by as much as 25%

Re: Uk high Speed modem tethering question
 

Indeed, I tried again recently and it worked fine. I think that before I was making the connection slightly differently (ie. not *99#), and three were seeing the phone as making the connection directly, and reading it's user-agent instead of mine. At least, that's all I can figure. I'm happily browsing now, and £5pm for 1gb on PAYG is a bargain, especially as IMAP works through it.