Features

How to get online with a PC and a GPRS SmartPhone and infinite patience

This message comes to you via an Orange SPV SmartPhone. It's pretending to be a modem as I sit in the hills in the Spanish Alpujarra, connecting my PC to the Internet. That's the good news. Now, you want the "how-not-to" and "what not to try"?

Officially, the how-to is simple. You connect your SPV to your PC over a USB cable, enable the modem link, and dial. A few seconds later, you're on the Internet.

Now: reality.

The first thing you discover is that your PC, as soon as it sees the SPV attached to a USB cable, will automatically start a program called ActiveSync, and attempt to update all your Outlook data from PC to Smartphone. In theory, this shouldn't stop the modem link from working. In the real world, it probably will.

So your first step is to open up ActiveSynch yourself, and disable the USB connectivity. And your next step, is to discover that you need a file on your PC - the drivers for the modem.

This is USBMDM.INF and if you have the disc that comes with the newest SPV Smartphones, you'll have it, and if you normally travel with a CD drive in your notebook you can read it. Naturally, I didn't, and I don't.

I was assured that I could download it. This is not the moment or the place to describe my response; but it can be summarised as: "If I had been in a position to download it, I wouldn't have needed it, would I?" and a friend very kindly copied his driver onto a compact flash card, and then onto my machine - thanks very much, Stevie! - and there you were: fixed.

No, not quite. My friend - an expert in these things, being the technical head of Microsoft in the UK on Smartphone devices - then spent 30% of my PC battery trying to make the two things talk to each other. In the end, he had to reboot the machine, all else having utterly failed. We then spent another half hour trying to get the phone to connect to the Internet.

Finally, success. "Thanks a lot!" I said, and really meant it. And at that point, the train disappeared under the English Channel, and no more experimentation could be done. When we re-appeared, magically, we reconnected, and I very nearly got a story uploaded to NewsWireless.Net before the battery on the PC finally expired. We'd have managed, but there are several tunnels between Dover and Waterloo, and each time the GPRS connection stopped being "always on" as they say, and we had to start again.

I left my friend at Waterloo, and promised to write up a "how-to" piece so that other people could use their SPVs as modems.

The next day, I plugged them in and started writing my article.

The first thing I wanted to do was illustrate the article with screens grabbed from the phone. You do this via ActiveSync. So the first thing I had to do was re-enable ActiveSync via USB. Rather to my surprise, this proved impossible. There was the option, but it was greyed out; and USB connect was marked "Not Supported." Eh? Nothing would convince it otherwise; I abandoned the attempt to get illustrations off the phone screen.

The next thing I wanted to do was get some screen shots of the phone connecting. So I plugged the phone in.

"New hardware detected!" said Windows proudly.

I thought: "That can't be right. I installed this yesterday. What on earth shall we do now?"

In the end, without alternatives obviously available, I let the New Hardware Wizard install. "The software you are installing," it warned me, "HTC USB Modem, has not passed Windows logo testing ... "

That sinking feeling which has been written about so often, so eloquently, was dragging me down. This isn't going to work, I thought. How right I was.

For the next two days, I tried everything I could think of to make the wretched thing work, and it simply wouldn't. I got more error messages than my screen had room to display:

"Error 777: The connection attempt failed because the modem (or other connecting device) on the remote computer is out of order."

"Error 734: The PPP link control protocol was terminated."

"Error 692: There was a hardware failure in the modem (or other connecting device)."

The problem turned out to be pretty simple, when I finally found the answer. The answer was that -on this PC, at any rate - if you plug the phone into the other USB port, the computer thinks it's a different modem, and installs it all over again. And my mistake was to imagine that if it had been working before, it should still be working. Whereas, in fact, the "new" modem wasn't set up properly. It should have a complex init string set up.

In my defence, I will say that it was an understandable mistake, because it did carry on working. For no obvious reason, the first thing it ever did after being installed as "HTC USB Modem #2" was to connect flawlessly. It never did again, until I typed the full initialisation magic spell in, and I have not met anybody who can explain how on earth it managed.

Once I found the "extra" modem and deleted it, and installed the proper one with the proper configuration, it worked. Not every time, because it doesn't. Over the next three days, I found several other reasons why it can fail:-

1) the network you're logged into doesn't do GPRS. A third of the time, here in Southern Spain, you get Telefonica "Movistar". Another third, you get AMENA. And finally, you can get Airtel for another third of the time. Movistar has a GPRS service; AMENA does not. Airtel says it does, but not once while I was here did it actually function correctly.

2) The service can be nominally provided, but malfunctioning. That is to say, the network responds with the data that there is a GPRS network - a big "G" displayed on the top line of the phone - but when you try to connect to it, it simply rejects you. You can test for this fault relatively simply by trying to surf the net via the Smartphone itself; if you can get connected, then the GPRS service is obviously "live" but ...

3) just because the service is live doesn't mean that it will issue a PC with the data it needs to go online. You need a Dynamic Host Control Protocol server working for a PC (as best I can tell, it doesn't seem to be critical for the phone for some reason) and if it isn't, then you can't register the computer on the network. Even if it does ...

4) you may find you can only connect to Web sites where you know the full IP address. If you want to connect to www.newswireless.net you have to know that it's 217.146.97.25 or nothing will happen. And for that to happen, you need a working directory, or Domain Name Service server. And several times, I found that Telefonica had a live Web service, but not a DNS. In the end, I had to use my own DNS machine in London, which is less than ideal

5) Even if all those are working, you can still have no luck connecting, because of timeouts. The first, and easily the most frustrating, is the phone modem timeout. Because the phone uses valuable electric power driving a modem link to the PC over infra-red, Microsoft has thoughtfully set it up so that the modem disables itself after a minute. The fact that it costs nothing at all in electric power to drive a USB modem is irrelevant.

So you can activate the modem - itself a very complex set of operations - and connect it to the PC (and you really don't want to try doing it in the other order) and then bring up the dialler, only to find that the PC doesn't think there's a modem there. It will say "No Dialtone!" pityingly. Only on later investigation will you discover that it has helpfully decided that in the absence of the GPRS modem, you probably want to use the normal phone modem. But that's not connected to anything, and so "no dialtone" is certainly correct.

5) There's also the network timeout. So far, I haven't managed to find what this is supposed to be, but it varies; and if the network is asked to connect you and fails, then at some point, it stops trying. All you get is a generic "failure" message. You can try again, but at that point, you may very well discover that the SPV modem has now switched itself off to "save power" again.

6) Unofficially, in Spain, there's the GPRS timeout. This shouldn't exist anywhere, and in some parts of Europe it's getting rare. Not here; you are sitting comfortably, fluently sending and receiving data, when suddenly, the powers that be throw a switch or trip over a cable or offend some minor deity, and GPRS ceases to be. It can be very, very annoying, especially if you're half-way through an FTP file transfer to your web site at the time, and realise that only half an important file has been updated ...

I could go on. I ran into several other little snags, too. Once, I needed only put the computer onto the table, moving it three feet from my lap. That was enough to lose my connection with the network. And then there's spoofing; the GPRS connection isn't really permanently connected at all. It tells you you are, but it only connects you to the other end when you have data to send; and there are problems with some software which actually needs to be really connected. Internet Relay Chat, for example, seems happy to pretend it's sending and receiving pings and pongs; but if nobody else in the chatline is sending real data, you will be logged off, invisibly.

The fact that you're reading this at all, proves that eventually, I got it to work. A simple step by step guide is now online. I hope it allows you to avoid some of the worst miseries - but do try to avoid the final one, which is the one that will be reserved for your return to your home base; and that's the bill.

Roaming on GPRS can be very, very cheap indeed, because there are still some roaming agreements which haven't been finalised, and the bill goes nowhere. But they can also be very, very costly; and if you just arrive in Spain without a special deal set up, you can find yourself paying over 25 Euros per megabyte. And after a week travelling around remote country districts and reading email, this figure can get really scary ...