Laptop + Cell Phone = Wireless internet???

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bobsaget

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jan 24, 2004
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I heard somewhere, I can't remember where, that you can hook your cell phone (with internet on it) to your laptop, and you could have internet wherever your cell phone gets service.

Is this true? If so, what would I need to do to get it?


thanks
 
You need an adapter card, and that service on your phone. It is expensive, and VERY slow. VERY VERY slow.
 
Sprint offers PCS vision, that's pretty speedy, and Nextel is beta testing 1.5mbps data services in the Richmond, VA area right now. hopefully it'll be available all over soon...
 
I use my PocketPC (and soon my laptop, tested it on laptops at work and it's usable but slow) to access the internet through my cell phone using bluetooth. Infrared works as well. Tmobile charges $20 per month to add unlimited data to any account, so as long as you have a phone with IR or bluetooth (or both), you're good to go. Speed testing showed it to be just above a 33.6 modem. Slow, but for checking websites and email on occasion, it's not too shabby. Especially for only $20 a month.
 
You can do it with t-mobile for $20/month, unlimited data transfer.. I do it using my motorola v300 and a usb data cable.. you can also buy a card from them for $100 that just pops into the pcmcia slot and serves the same purpose..
 
I connect my Sprint phone to my notebook with a usb cable and get about a 120k-230k connection anywhere on the sprint network with the unlimited pcs vision plan, which is only $10 extra monthly. Works great for me.
 
i've used it with verizon too...

was surprised by the speed, really


set it up for an insurance adjuster who uses it at the end of the day to email in all the photos on his way home...
 
soo... if you have a sprint pcs plan, you can get the data for an additional $10? Really? That's cool!
 
Actually even with their Picture Vision pac you also will get unlimited internet and it's only 5 bucks.

JDLT1
 
Now if only we could get a CDMA phone with bluetooth capabilities...so I could easily use the high speed with both my Ipaq and laptop. Oh well.
 
I read on howard's forums of one guy using an audiovox phone with a usb cable and basically using the phone as a modem. i.e. dialing up his isp # and getting connected by just placing a regular phone call. No extra data charges, he just gets charged for regular minutes while he's online.

Need and aftermarket usb cable and 3rd party drivers to get it to work. I've been interested to see if it would really work.
 
i'm on tmobile and i hook up my cellphone to my laptop via bluetooth and the service i use is free and surfing around 40K
 
i am using Tmobile too, i have the service to get online but its so damn slow... your saying your doing it "free"?
 
it IS free, TMO made a change three months ago that included WAP Access for all accounts. Thou i can't go on secure sites, but heck its better than nothing.
 
i would hate to ask you this, but can you e-mail me and gimme some more info. stuff like the WAP and all... plz, thanks
 
I remember reading somewhere on howardforums.com about being able to do it free through Tmo thanks to their enabling WAP on all handsets, so you might check their as well...there were some limitations if I recall correctly, although the only one might've been the lack of secure sites. I thought there was some issue about what ports you were able to connect through as well..
 
Originally posted by kleptophobiac
whoa! What happened there?
Click to expand...

pff yeah, i know, lol. Only have Dial Up at my cabin in TN which is in the middle of no where, so thats the only way i can get on. at my lake house i am bummin internet off of my neighbor who was wireless T1 :-D
 
Originally posted by kleptophobiac
why on earth not?
Click to expand...

Since it's free and only intended for WAP, only the email port and port 80 for general web browsing is enabled.

But hey I can do so much with it. Check email, surf, IM :)
 
I have a lake house over on Norris in TN.... I get a dazzling 26.4kbps there. I also don't have PCS coverage (or cell coverage at all) there. Sucks.

There's a real bandwidth shock when I travel from my home and have a 3200/384 and go there where I have a 26.4/20
 
From November 2002 until September 2003 I used PCS Vision with my Cellphone (Sanyo 4900) for internet access while in AIT at Fort Gordon, Georgia. I downloaded 10-15gigs a month on that service(desktop charger is a must, no power from the usb cable = dead batter after 20megs).
My average download was about 12 kiloBYTES per second.

The service was great in Georgia. It was also a full net connection, I used IRC, Messenger, etc. The trick was to constantly ping a web address with 1byte packets to keep the connection alive. (ping www.whatever.com -l 1 -t)

Here in Colorado it sucks major balls. The connection stalls when you try to pull more than two data streams. Meaning you need to set your browser to only open one data connection and not try to pull three images at once.

So it is fine for uploading pictures(I've seen as high as 350kbit uploads), IRC, etc. Depending on where you live. Unusable for latency sensitive things.
 
sprint and verizion have everyone beat as far as speed goes rite now.
 
I am looking at what Sprint offers in my area. Here is the service plan I would be interested in, but the Picture Pack is another $15 a month, not $5.

So how are people picking this up for $5 a month? Am I looking at the wrong thing or what?

I am trying to justify going this route. I dont have broadband access where I live and this is one of my only options.

My other delema is I would have to drop my current SprintPCS package, which is $15 a month for 750 anytime minutes and 750 nitetime minutes, 1,500 total. Also I have no contract on this plan which is a big advantage to me.
 
i cant wait till the day when there will be wireless internet everywhere. at T3 speed :-D one day, lol. but to much wireless internet on everything is bad...ex: easy as hell to get into systems with Knoppix and a WiFi card.
 
If your provider offers it, what i got is a *really* nice solution...

I'm using Rogers At&T (soon to have no at&t in the name), and back in the old school days of cell phones they had a thing they called "portage". Basically u buyed some crazy expensive cable, and you could plug it into serial port of your laptop. Now they have a new thing called "portage plus". But that is super expensive, as it is through gprs, which costs like 5 billion dollars per mb. However, they still offer the portage service. But instead of using crazy expensive cable to connect your phone, you can do it through infrared connection to your phone. The only newish (like from the last 3 years) phone that does this that i know of is the nokia 3360. There is likely others, but not likely many. The portage data service is completely free. You jsut have to phone them to enable it. And you have to have your own dialup isp. You get billed airtime, thatz it (although if u got like unlim weekends, then even that is free). Downside is that it goes a nice fast 9,600 bytes per second :)

However, it is usable for just web browsing and irc and such
And ya can't beat the price
 
yeah its called CSD = Circuit Switch Data. Old news... GPRS is faster than CSD
 
I'm over here in europe, and I just put down a payment for a Cellular modem from vodafone. It is supposed to connect at speeds up to 384Kbps.

There should be similar products stateside, though, in the states I beleive the telecoms use GPRS, here the modem works on a UMTS network. If anyone has had experience with this hardware it would be awesome if you let me know how it worked out for you.

If not, well I'll let anyone who cares know how it worked out for me.
 
Originally posted by Hav0k
Now if only we could get a CDMA phone with bluetooth capabilities...so I could easily use the high speed with both my Ipaq and laptop. Oh well.
Click to expand...

You can get a Sony Ericsson T608 for Sprint, it has bluetooth, but it doesn't have sms.
 
Originally posted by Hav0k
Now if only we could get a CDMA phone with bluetooth capabilities...so I could easily use the high speed with both my Ipaq and laptop. Oh well.
Click to expand...

Sony Ericsson T608 is available through Sprint. It is a little bigger than the T61x series and it also has no camera. It does however have bluetooth.

Verizon is getting a bluetooth Sony Ericsson aswell, as to model# and when I am not sure.
 
I read on howard's forums of one guy using an audiovox phone with a usb cable and basically using the phone as a modem. i.e. dialing up his isp # and getting connected by just placing a regular phone call. No extra data charges, he just gets charged for regular minutes while he's online.
Click to expand...

I do this on my sony t616. it dials up to my ISP with a built in modem over bluetooth from my laptop. I used it last weekend at the st louis supercross in my hotel room (no broad band..blah)

its slower than dog poo, but better than nothing.
 
in china, you could get a GSM card for $100 + one year 7/24 service for another $100.

So, next time, if you travel to China, it is the best way to
go online anywhere
 
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