This guide will teach you how to access the internet using your cellphone.
You are finally getting away from the hustle and bustle of city life. Your
kind uncle has agreed to let you use his holiday cabin conveniently
located in the middle of nowhere.
There's one problem though. Considering that there are no internet connections or phone lines in the middle of nowhere, you have to survive the weekend without any internet access.So what does a certified internet addict like you do in this situation?
Keep calm and reach for your cellphone and laptop when you feel the withdrawl symptoms kicking in.
Let's get down to business. If you are like most people, you probably use
your cell phone to talk to people and send an occasional text message. Well, your cellphone can do much more than that. What you probably don't know is that most cellphones out there have an inbuilt modem.
I think you catch my drift. Where there is a modem, there is internet. So now you've found a modem you have to figure out a way to connect it to your laptop. There are two options:
1) USB
2) Infrared Port
If you have a USB connector cable that came with your phone you probably received the necessaru software with it. Read the documentation, plug in the phone to the laptop and install the drivers for you phone.
If you don't have a USB cable then don't fret. You are safe as long as both your phone and yourlaptop have infrared ports. Installing the modem over infrared is simple.
Turn on infrared on both the phone and the laptop and align the ports so that they face each other. The computer will immidiately detect the cell phone modem. If you are running Windows XP, you don't even need to download drivers. Just let windows install the drivers automatically. I've tried several cellphones withXP and all of them worked perfectly with the standard drivers.
Now that you have the modem installed, how do you go about connecting to the internet? Again, you have two options:
1) Dialup an ISP
2) Use GPRS
Your newly installed cell phone modem can be easily configured like any other dialup modem. If you have an dialup account with an ISP(Internet Service Provider), create a new dialup connection and set it to use the cellphone modem. You can now dial your ISP as if you are using a normal phone line. Just remember that you are paying for the phone call so be mindful if you have to make a long distance call to reach yourISP.
A cheaper option is to use GPRS (General Packet Radio Service). This is a technology that enables cellhones to send and receive digital data. We are now going to use it to access the internet.
To use this option, your phone must be GPRS enabled and you must subscribe to the GPRS service from your mobile operator. Your phone manual will tell you if your phone supports GPRS. A quick call to the mobile operator will help you find out if GPRS is activiated on your connection. Once you have activated GPRS for your phone connection, there's very little left to do.
In order to access the internet. create a standard dialup connection and set it to use the cell phone modem. In order to access the GPRS connection, you must dial into a special number. This number will look somehing like '*99*#'. Call up your mobile operator to find out what the access number is. Make sure you ask them for the username and password as well. In my case the username and password are both left blank. So I have a dialup connection with blank username and password fields.
Once you set everything up as above, just hit 'dial' and wait fot the connection to be establsihed. Within seconds, you will have a working internet connection at your disposal.
The great thing about GPRS is that you are charged by the amount of data transferred and not by the duration of the connection. This means that you can chat online for hours and hours and still pay peanuts.
The downside is that GPRS is even slower than dialup. Accessing internet through GPRS can be a very trying experience if you are used to broadband. However, GPRS is great for emergencies when you have no other method to access the internet.
A word of caution:
I mentioned earlier that GPRS is charged by the amount of data (per kilobyte). This works to our advantage when we transfer a small amount of data over a long period of time (as we do when we chat online). However, if you use GPRS to transfer large amounts of data, you will find that it is much more expensive than dialup internet. So make sure you don't get carried away when using GPRS.
Well, I think we've solved the problem of your internet access for the weekend. Now it's time to see someone about your internet addiction.
p.s: In case you are stuck in the middle of nowhere with just a cellphone, you might still be able to access the internet. Read more about it in the next post.
