Peter’s Blog

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.