Mobile Data via Bluetooth is a pile of crap
No internet at the company apartment I’ve been staying, right?
So when I’m back from work and I am wanting to blog, work, send meaningful emails, and so on, it’s just not happening.
AHHHHHH
Hold on! I have my Nokia E61 on T-Mobile.
I got all excited.
‘Ok,’ I thought, ‘It’ll be slow, but, you know, it’ll work…’
I fire up my launch2net software and have it detect the E61. It does. It finds the T-Mobile connection, knocks up a modem driver and then the ‘connect’ button appears.
I grin.
I click connect and 10 seconds later, after opening various ports and things, there’s a mobile connection.
‘Gosh,’ I think, ‘it’s really quite fast,’ as BBC News loads up reasonably quickly. Heh.
I’m feeling proud of the technology — and myself. It’s working. It’s perhaps equivalent to a 28k modem, I reckon.
I bring up a SSH client and make a connection. Very usable. That’s a good test. I check my email and navigate to the blog…
And then it hangs.
Arse.
I reconnect.
All good. Then it hangs again.
What the?
Hang. Disconnect. Reconnect. Internet. Hang. Disconnect.
I don’t get it. I can use internet perfectly fine on my E61 — for example, I can carry on a conversation on Agile Messenger (via MSN or Gtalk) for hours. But when it comes to poncing about with Bluetooth, no deal.
At least for me.
It kept on hanging and screwing up.
Any thoughts? I tried it with the Nokia N93. Same issue on a different operator.
Does anyone actually reliably use Mobile Data via Bluetooth regularly? If so, can you tell me what equipment you’re using?
I regularly use an N70 via bluetooth to connect my pc to the internet. It didn’t work the first time tho. Had to upgrade the odd modem driver or two.
Design by committee I guess.
Richard Spence
Posted by Richard Spence on January 25th, 2007 at 10:58 pm.Ewan,
Posted by Jeb on January 26th, 2007 at 12:09 am.I know you are wanting to you use BT but my laptop doesn’t have BT so I use the pop port cable and get on a very reasonable speeds. I hate that I have to use a cable, I promised myself my next laptop will have BT but it works.
Maybe it’s a firmware issue - I use T-Mobile data on the e61 over Bluetooth to a mac for at least an hour a day, and generally it only disconnects when the signal drops (understandable).
With regards to the 28k connection speed, this evening on the boat I was streaming YouTube videos over the connection, and the experience was the same as it would be at home (i.e. crap quality, but I don’t think that’s T-Mobile’s fault
- generally it’s equivalent to a 512kbit broadband connection for downloads, and I regularly get 40-50kbytes/sec out of it.
I’m not using the launch2net software, but I presume all it does is is use the standard GPRS/3G AT commands to the modem emulation in the phone.. so should be the same.
(Sidenote.. does anyone else get graphic corruption in the comments box on Ewan’s blog when filling it on a mac, in Camino and Firefox?)
Posted by Jay on January 26th, 2007 at 12:55 am.Graphics corruption? Hmm. I am typing in Camino and see nothing. Er, except the cursor is blinking ridiculously fast. Other than that, all is fine.
Posted by ewan on January 26th, 2007 at 12:59 am.I use the E61 with my powerbook via bluetooth as well, no problems from me, using a similar setup to the instructions at http://www.nokme.com/connect-to-gprs-internet-using-nokia-e61-on-mac-29.html
I find the speeds to be a bit slower than Jay does, my speed tests suggest that here is Croydon I get around 128kbit (could just be Croydon though TBH).
Annoyingly the E61 isn’t an HSDPA device so you’ll never get super-high speeds, although I notice there is a high-speed service automatically added to my T-Mobile account so if you stick your SIM in an HSDPA handset or data card and (if you’re in an area covered by T-Mobile’s HSDPA network) you should get 2mbit down and 384kbit up… the future is bright… no, wait.
(also, no graphics corruption here using the Camino nightly build)
Posted by Dan Lane on January 26th, 2007 at 3:18 am.I’ve used an Orange SPV500 and a T-Mobile MDA Vario with a HP nc6000/nc4010 laptops with the Bluetooth for HP (WIDCOMM) drivers, running under Windows XP Pro SP2.
I could never get dial up networking to work until I went into Control Panel -> Phone and Modem Options, found the bluetooth modem and entered the extra initialization commands in the ‘Advanced’ tab.
+CGDCONT =1,”IP”, “orangeinternet”
Oddly, I didn’t change the ‘orangeinternet’ when I switched to T-Mobile but it didn’t seem to matter.
I only really dive in and out of collecting e-mails so don’t generally have the bluetooth on that long, but I have forgotten about it a few times and 20 minutes later it was still collecting e-mails.
Posted by Liam Westley on January 26th, 2007 at 4:52 pm.I’m using an A1000 with a Windows machine, so, as you’d expect, I’ve run into trouble. Mostly driver trouble. If you’re using Windows, make sure you try several versions of all the relevant drivers - the latest one isn’t the most stable for me, so maybe not for you either.
Posted by Daniel on January 27th, 2007 at 2:37 am.Hi,
there are two issues: First check if you E61 really has the latest firmware. This is vital, even though you can use the built in software, the E61 behaves differently when it is used as a modem device.
Then: ssh clients behave strange when you use them over a mobile GSM connection. Which one do you use, did it work before, is there another one you can use?
With low-speed ssh access like with GPRS connections it very often happens for the network provider to drop the connection, since he thinks there is no more data flow …
Thanks,
Jan Fuellemann |Â nova media
Posted by Jan Fuellemann on January 28th, 2007 at 6:30 pm.I’m using a Nokia N73 with T-Mobile connecting over bluetooth. Was a bit of a pain to setup with OSX 10.4, but in the end I found these instructions worked fine:
http://thinkabdul.com/2006/11/25/tutorial-connect-to-gprs-internet-from-mac-osx-with-nokia-s60-as-bluetooth-gprs-modem/
I haven’t done any speed tests but I found the connection adequate for developing with a SSH terminal and most web browsing. Only issue for me is battery life: I’ve had to splash out on a USB charger cable/spare battery…
Posted by Paul Coghlan on January 30th, 2007 at 12:43 pm.Agree, bluetooth communications sucks, think i will wait a few more year or until the device drivers manufacturers and hardware manufacturers make something that isn’t so crappy. Imagine a barcode scanner, that works for 3 scan’s then disconnects, i can see people in the supermarkets waitiing while the check out operator reconnects.
Posted by BT sucks on November 4th, 2007 at 6:29 am.i’m using a thinkpad r61 and a nokia 6230i over bluetooth and its giving me bloody immense speeds.. i have one of these sidekick dealies and it was useless . did NOT work as a modem, but this 6230i so robust, and of course i dont care about destroying it because its a pice of crap,
definately a good move getting the built in bluetooth,
the nokia combo also gets my macbook mobile.. at fair speeds
Posted by Chris on February 12th, 2008 at 2:14 am.