The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged HSDPA
ZTE Cocktail
12 years ago
Today I bought an HSDPA modem (ZTE MF628) designed by Moods of Norway. Three designs are available, and I chose ZTE Cocktail with blue tractors and pink cocktails (I guess that is how they party on Voss?). Who said that modems all should have the same horrible design? The three design got launched during the Oslo Fashion Week back in February this year.
The modem is made by ZTE Corporation, an unknown company for us living in Norway, but it is China’s largest listed telecommunications manufacturer and wireless solutions provider. It can do downloads up to 7,2 Mbps.
The installation of the modem’s straight forward as long as you install it for Windows XP/Vista. I didn’t manage to install it for Windows 7. It also comes with drivers for MacOS X, and it also reported to work with Linux (Ubuntu). The coolness dropped a little bit, when I saw the horrible user interface that came with the application that establishes the Internet connection. Fact is, I have never seen a good design for this simple kind of application. Mobile Connect looked ok, launch2net did not! I haven’t used the modem a lot, but it seems to be of a good quality. The modem also come with the possibility to read/write to Mini-SD card. Nice for people having digital compact camera with that kind of card reader.
Hopefully a future version of the modem’s driver, let you do the dial up directly from Windows 7, without these funny/horrible looking 3rd party applications.
A travel with HSDPA
13 years ago
Last week I was helping my parents to move from Flekkefjord to Oslo. My father landed on Gardemoen on Wednesday eve, and we traveled down to Flekkefjord with train the following morning. I had planned to work a little bit on the train over a mobile connection. Something that seemed to be more or less impossible.
First of all, the USB dongle seemed to loose connection as soon as you more or less moved. I had to reconnect several times, and some times that wasn’t enough, the software (Mobile Connect) needed to be restarted. I even experienced the software to crash and then not willing to start again, until the machine was restarted. Just as big a problem was the quality of the connection. Soon after Oslo, HSDPA was reduced to UMTS, and after Kongsberg to Edge. Long distances was as low as GPRS.
In the evening I was sitting with my laptop in the kitchen home in Flekkefjord, trying to answer some mails from colleagues at work. I was surprised, Netcom’s net in Flekkefjord was already upgraded to HSDPA. It was rock solid and a great alternative to traditional broadband at home. The following morning we started early driving to back to Oslo with car. The mobile experience was far better then on the train. As a passenger in a car, I had far better mobile connection and was able to work.
I don’t find this acceptable, why should business travelers consider train as a way of traveling? Shouldn’t train have been the perfect place to work? I used to pay extra for an office seat on the trains, to get power for my laptop and to get free access to newspapers. But isn’t what people that upgrade to office seat really want, Internet connection to be able to write e-mails and access corporate databases? Well, I have had my last travel to Flekkefjord, I guess …
Mac and UMTS/HSDPA
5Do really want to get mobile with your Mac? Well, appearently it isn’t that easy.
I have bought the first UMTS-card for the office to my boss, and he is a Windows user. He got a small Thinkpad X60 (12″ laptop), and travels to and from work with train. The idea was to buy an UMTS card so that he could work on his daily travels, and it that way spend a little bit less time in the office. Something that has worked out quite nicely for him. He can mount his homearea with Cisco VPN, and in that was also access his user id to start Lotus Notes.
Well, users that are happy with a solution tend to advertise it. So yesterday one of my professor came in and asked for the same solution for his MacBook Pro. My answer was I guess you can have it, but let me try first cause I have never used a Mac with an UMTS card. Our provider, Netcom, has bought licenses for the application launch2net, so it was just for me to call them and get the license code. The application was easy to set up and use, but … under Windows I had no problems using Cisco VPN to access my files on homearea. Cisco VPN for some reason refuses to start on the Mac when using launch2net! And, I was not alone to run in to that problem. Just do a quick search for it, and you will several people complaining in various blogs and forums.
NovaMedia, the company behind launch2net, advertise for VPN Tracker on their pages. First of all, I didn’t get around to test that application as it is high priced (79 €) and that we have site license for Cisco VPN. If not something else, a half decent solution would be using SFTP to the homearea instead with Fugu or Cyberduck.
The solution for launch2net to work with Cisco VPN seems to be to force the PPP connection to always use an MTU of 1356, something that must be changed through Terminal and possibly as a script that runs each time you start launch2net. Not pretty, and not something for the common user. I guess I will try next week and see if I can get it working then.
A word or two to NovaMedia is in it’s place! If you want to target business users with your product, get your product working with the Cisco VPN client. It is the standard itself. I had heard of VPN Tracker, but I have never heard of any companies using it!
