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Sony Ericsson Makes a tri-band GPRS modem
prostoalex writes "Sony Ericsson announced their new PCMCIA GPRS wireless modem, capable of delivering 57.6 Kbps. It is tri-band and works in 900/1800/1900 MHz range, which led Sony Ericsson to imply that the card will work in 160 countries, providing an always-on Internet connection. Currently only Microsoft operating systems (starting at Windows 98) are supported. No exact price information on official site, but the PC Pro article above quotes 200 UK pounds. The manufacturer also runs a contest for those who would rather get one for free."
Finally I can lug my PC Case around with me to the mall and always have a connection to slashdot!
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
will they manufacture a wireless modem that is "always on" in 160 countries, but bumps it up to high speeds when I stroll through a Ricochet zone or a community 802.11b hot spot? Never? The Jetsons promised me way much more than this. Come on -- chop, chop -- make it happen.
Thoughts from a GPRS user:
I have a Handspring Treo phone here in Denmark, and it works great with GPRS. However, the cost (around 20c US / Mb) adds up quickly..
Coverage is fine and it is very usefull. But untill providers give unlimited use plans, this is very cost-prohibitive.
The manufacturer also runs a contest for those who would rather get one for free.
Who wouldn't rather get one for free?
As with the sun's light
My mom was magnificent
Unquestionable
So on the contest site (sonyericsson.com), in the rules it states that it's a EUR 399 value
The prize consists of one Sony Ericsson GPRS PC Card Modem, GC75, which has a recommended retail price of EUR 399.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
What si the security like with this thing, it works in the 900Mhz range, I know alot of 900Mhz phones that are easily tapped with cheap equiptment. I hope Sony has thought this through.
Personally, I hope they haven't. Maybe that's bad, but it's true.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Heh. Either you're trolling, or you completely miss the point. Try taking your cable modem to another country... or even accross town. Try using it from the local coffee shop. Nope. Didn't think so.
This is seriosly cool stuff. I wish (WISH!) that GPRS (or even good GSM coverage) was available in the USA at large. I'm still stuck with my TDMA phone until they get better coverage.
With At&T, I pay $5 for every 2 megs of bandwidth used. If I buy this card, it would cost me $15 just to download all the porn spam I get every morning. Unless the bandwidth costs get reasonable, I won't buy it. What happens if I accidently click on a goatse link? Can I send someone an invoice?
So I've been reading about how in the UK everyone is using bluetooth enabled devices. This device becomes a perfect example of a "why do we need this?" product.
The way things should be:
- Most notebooks come with bluetooth.
- you have a Bluetooth enabled GPRS phone.
Done.. there is your internet connection.
Intead, for us stuck here in North America. We get CDMA, and no bluetooth to speak of (except as an option on some high end notebooks). Sure we can buy an adapter for the notebook. But no phones.
--- tracer.ca
GPRS, HSCSD, and 802.11 all in a single PC Card? orig=/ phones/nokiad211)
(http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html
If it's like other PCMCIA GPRS cards I've encountered, it might work under Linux/BSD/etc. - simply appearing as a serial device to which you send AT commands (and thus available to run pppd on).
The Windows-only sticker may just refer to some cutesy control centre applet which will (obviously) only run on Windows. Every modem needs its own control centre on Windows these days, it seems.
This is interesting. According to the article, you can swap out the SIM card on the modem. Two immediate options occured to me. One, cell phone theft is a problem in Europe. This can lead to people swiping a cell phone, grabbing the SIM card and doing whatever needs to be done anonymously via the Internet. I'm sure everyone can use their imagination. Second, and perhaps more interesting, there are various services that will purchase or provide SIM cards that are (more or less) anonymous, so you can make phone calls that are not traceable to you. These pre-paid SIM cards are rechargable. This could be a help if you had one in a climate where you needed to make sure something you posted on the web, for example, would be far more difficult to trace. Very exciting. Brave new world.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
900 MHz is also European GSM range. They cannot be easily tapped with cheap equipment.
Also note, when they are talking about triband, they mean 900/1800/1900 MHz, GSM only.
Also, compare it to the Nokia Cardphone. Works with Linux, too :-)
**** 900 MHz is also European GSM range. They cannot be easily tapped with cheap equipment.
Also note, when they are talking about triband, they mean 900/1800/1900 MHz, GSM only.****
i'd mod you up, gsm, not nmt/whatever.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Check out the D211t ml
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,4879,1449,00.h
It is a wireless PCMCIA conectivity card, which supports both GPRS and 802.11b
There are even linux drivers avalabe to to download. (I don't know if they work)
It has been out for a couple of months.
The main downside is that it only supports dual band opperation, so I guess american readers are out of luck.
The other downside is that switching between GPRS and 802.11 is not automatic, though you could probably put together a script to make it so.
I dare say it is rather expensive as well.
It's not a phone, that wouldn't be news, I've got a tri-band GPRS phone in my pack. Plug it in via firewire... anyway this isn't a phone, it doesn't do voice, data only, it's a PMCIA card dedicated GPRS modem. And you're right, it's expensive, mind you the nice thing with GPRS is that you don't pay for time connected, just bits transferred, so if you filter your mail on the server and browse with lynx you could keep constantly up to date relatively cheaply. GPRS service in Europe runs around 20 cents a megabyte IIRC, depending on where you are of course... anyone know about the US? it would definately get expensive fast if you don't take steps to keep your bandwidth usage limited.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Turns out with my T68, Bluetooth dongle, and iBook, I already have a tri-band GRPS phone that works with a stable operating system...
Score:-1, Funny
why not just buy a gprs phone? then use infra-red to connect your notebook/ppc to the phone?
They keep coming out with this cool technology but price it out of reach. My T39 Ericsson mobile phone has been able to connect via GPRS and my laptop's IrDA port for a year now, never done it though because my network providers (O2) costs is extortionate in my opinion, I stick to GSM dialup at 9600 bps to download my email when I am on the move. These mobile telcos shoot themselves in the foot.
Three years ago they were pushing WAP hard but then made it expensive to use, so no-one used it in Europe and all the techie press (including slashdot) said it was a dead and cr@p because of the small form factor, where are the WAP sites now? Slashdot's WAP site seems to have gone (eh Taco?). In South Korea they made WAP and GPRS affordable, and everyone used it, there are lots of sites and both technologies are considered a success.
The really strange technology success (for the telcos) is txting, they thought no-one would be interested so they bundled it as a cheap feature, and everyone used it. If they make GPRS cheap and put useful things on WAP (such as TV guides) then everyone will use it.
£rd generation mobile technologies will also fail unless these telcos learn this painful lesson.
Missing options:
I'm from Ecuador, you insensitive clod!
CowboyNealia
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
We must quietly respect the gentle extension of market share on the part of the Big Guy. No whining, no complaints, no trolls: manufacturers are flooding the market with products that are only going to work with the Master System.
The reasonable thing to do is refuse to purchase these products until a reasonable selection of drivers is available for them.
Also, try not to by new boxes incorporating inflexible hardware.
Smarter markets are the key to a better future.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Gee, too bad there's already the same thing... in Compact Flash.
0 00 .asp
http://www.shoppingpda.com/product/rtm8000/rtm8
GSM/GPRS, Tri-band, data, earphone jack for voice calls, supports PDAs & Windows - oh, and it's only $283 USD. Cheaper too.
When this tech is invisible, I'll be able to buy a laptop, and it will just be online. No worrying about cards or areas, it'll just be omnipresent connectivity.
All European cell-phones have removable SIM cards. Many, although most users don't realise it, have built in modems.
The Nokia 7xxx and 8xxx, plus the Ericsson R520, T28 and T68. By using either IR or Bluetooth, you can attach these phones to a laptop, and can then use an anonymous Internet account (like Freeserve in the UK.)
Indeed, I have been using this method (except for the Freeserve bit) for about four years now to access the web when I am travelling. It's not quick, but it's super useful.
Contrary to this posters' opinion, most criminals won't use stolen cell phones for Internet access. It's slow and clunky, and there are still ways to find who posted the hypothetical email message...
(1) Trace email message to ISP.
(2) Dredge ISP log to find phone number and time, duration of call.
(3) Contact cell phone company that carried the call, discover IMEI number of the cell-phone.
Now if anyone uses that cell phone again... you will know. You can track which cell they are in, etc. Complicated, but theoretically possible to catch the person you want.
Thx,
Robert
--- My dad's political betting
Seems like a great product that could be very useful to travelling businessmen, and even just vacationers looking for a good place to eat.
Finding food while travelling is one of the most basic instincts - even the most primitive hunters and gatherers managed it. I've been on many trips and vacations and never found it necessary to do much more than "follow my nose" to find something decent to eat. Most "travel guides" seem to steer you to over-priced tourist traps, so I would need some other motivation to take another expensive gizmo along on a vacation.
In most of the world there is no such thing as a doggie bag. -- Prof. Kelly Brownell
This is GSM, it's encrypted. It's crackable in reasonable time, but it's certainly not "easily tapped with cheap equipment". This is nothing new, remember GSM has been around for years. I have never heard of anyone tapping GSM transmissions (publically anyway), whilst it used to be common place with *shudder* analogue cellphones.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
In the U.S., at least, you can already purchase a CDMA 1x PC Card for $200 that will get you speeds over 100kbps.
I have a Motorola P280 (purchased last year) TriBand GSM Mobile which does the same thing. It's access is via t-mobile here in the states; it came with a serial cable which plugs right into the phone - the phone is a full 56k modem which when plugged into serial port is addressable as a standard modem - no special software required.
It also handles GPRS modem, which does require special "iStream" software ( dunno what voicestream calls it now that they rebanded to t-mobile) and only runs on Windows.
It has all the same features of the above mentioned modem, but it also is a phone.
I paid about $300 for it in January, so it's probably more affordable now.
They have an i280 now also that is same phone PLUS bluetooth.
I love the Motorola bluetooth car kit....
You pay for bytes on GPRS, not being online. Just like some of those corparate lines.
Youch, that's a lot more expensive than it is here (Sweden) IIRC. That said, if you really need the portable connection, there are ways to minimise the bandwidth needed. Filter your mail on the server, use an IMAP client (mail.app on mac, mutt on *nix, pmail on windows all work alright for this) and set it to only download headers automatically, wait till you request the message to get the body, wait till you request attachments to get them... and browse with lynx. Or at least turn off image loading. Do all that and you'll cut your bandwidth usage tremendously.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Tapping a GSM? um, its possible, with $100k equipment and a cool supercomputer like Cray or some Sun high end.but I think its easy to tap a ISP,e.g. bribing them.
GSM has encryription, a REAL high level of encyription.
So get this card and a WiFi card and configure your computer to change over to the WiFi network when possible. Something similar to how dual-band phones work. The project to implement an open (free as in speech and beer) wireless phone network is designed in such a way.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
funny, you can get the service in 160 countries but you cant get it in farking north dakota
forget it.
Why buy a modem card? Why not a cell phone and a cable or Bluetooth? It's almost as convenient and much more multi-purpose.
6310i is tri-band, has GPRS, Bluetooth, and all the standard phone stuff. And works perfecly with Linux. I'm quite happy with it, except when I have to reboot it occasionally to get the GPRS working.
With Bluetooth, any Bluetooth-cabable system can use the cell phone as a GPRS modem right from your pocket. For example, I have a Sony TRV-50 video camera that has Bluetooth, web browser, and e-mail client. Theoretically, I could use my cell phone as a modem for the camera. Ok, not in practice, I haven't gotten it to work yet.