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Which Cell Phones & Networks for SSH?

Posted by Cliff on from the GPRS-and-port-22 dept.

muffinresearch asks: "I've been thinking about picking up a new PDA/Smartphone in the seasonal sales, I am finding a lack of more technical information with regards to being able to use SSH software via GPRS. Now as far as I can see, the Treo 600, and the Sony-Ericsson P900/P910i can all use third-party SSH clients.However what is lacking here in the UK is info on which networks allow access on port 22, and whether this access requires a pay-monthly account or can you do it on a Pay-as-you-go account? I'm reckoning some of you will have useful info on what is working for you as far as phones and networks that do SSH, and your experiences in practice. Happy New Year to all!"

1 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Experience of ssh over gprs worldwide by sl956 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am a heavy user of ssh over gprs (or gsm where gprs is not available):
    I usually don't need/want a laptop when I am traveling so I initially went the PDA+cellphone way.
    I have used my old Zaurus SL-5000D with a bluetooth CF-card and a triband SonyEricsson cellphone (T68i, then T630) to ssh into my european servers from Europe (UK, Italy, NL), the US (NYC, LA), Asia (HK, Cambodia, Thailand) and even from Japan, using a rented blutooth-enabled cellphone.
    It has always worked flawlessly. I never had any problem with blocked 22 port or anything like that in any of these countries.
    I considered the Treo 600 very seriously, but I will stick to my current PDA+cellphone solution. In Japan the Treo would be as useless as my Sony-Ericsson. But it is a lot easier to rent a simple bluetooth-enabled cellphone and use my usual PDA than it would be to rent an integrated local smartphone with an ssh client.

    For the networks questions, there are more problems : if the cost is not important (company paid for instance), just use the roaming partners of your cellphone company : the big european players (Vodafone, Orange, T-mobile) usually try to have at least one partner allowing data in every country (be it over gprs or gsm). But it is expensive, and the costs are very difficult to predict. So if you want to optimize, you have to buy pay-as-you-go plans in every country, being careful to choose plans allowing data. You usually have to pay a premium for data but it is a lot cheaper than simply roaming.
    The biggest problem then becomes to choose the right simcard from you (huge) collection depending on the place where you are. It can sometimes be tricky like : So I am in Cambodia near the Thailand border and I don't have any Cambodian pay-as-you-go plan. Choices are using my 12Call simcard because i am not far from Thailand and I can see their network from here, or using my SmarTone simcard, roaming through a local network to HongKong, or simply use the local roaming partner of my european network. Which one would be the cheapest??? The answer, found by trying, was using my HongKong pay-as-you-go plan (SmarTone). Please don't ask me why. :-)

    Just my two euro-cents.