Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam - New York Times
Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.
No wonder Google is helping to build a new transpacific fiber cable.
I’m excited I got this working, so I figured to share this. Hopefully at least one person will stumble upon this in a Google search and be helped by it.
I have a phone plan with Rabo Mobiel (an MVNO) and (eventually will) have an unlimited data plan for €10 per month. It’s only GPRS right now but apparently once the network switches from Orange to KPN in mid April I’ll also be getting UMTS. Fair enough.
First, I wanted to get internet browsing working on my Nokia N73. Unfortunately when I used the phone wizard to get the network settings, it grabbed Orange access information. Which didn’t work. Super. However a quick Google search turned up a page on a somewhat shady site (they say they’re located in Amsterdam and China, but random parts of the site are in Russian). This page has what I needed: the names of the Rabo Mobiel access points are ‘Rabo’ and ‘Rabo.extra’. The latter is, according to the site, for unlimited data plans, so I used that. Entering it into my phone gave me mobile internet and now I have the Jaiku and Gmail apps on the phone. Nice.
But, what I really wanted was for my phone to act as a modem for my Macbook Pro. No more wishing for an internet connection at OpenCoffee! It’s kind of tricky but Ross Barkman is the man and has what you need: manufacturer-specific connection scripts. I downloaded the Nokia GPRS scripts and put them into /Library/Modem Scripts/ as instructed. After a fair bit of trial and error I got everything working. What I did was associate my phone with the laptop using Bluetooth and select the option to use the phone as a modem, using Ross’ Nokia GPRS CID1 script (unfortunately the +CGQREQ script, which is supposed to make things faster, doesn’t work for me). I then went to System Preferences > Network > Bluetooth and edited some settings. Under PPP I set the telephone number to be ‘Rabo.extra’ and then I clicked on PPP Options and unchecked Send PPP Echo Packets. From the PPP pane I clicked Dial Now and then Connect in the Internet Connect window that opens. Boom, my laptop’s on the internet using my mobile phone!
Note, while playing around with settings I made several other modem profiles in Internet Connect. While the profile that I use is called Main Number in Internet Connect, when clicking the modem status icon in the menu bar it was called Bluetooth. Weird.