Hello,
This post is not related to Tinycore but
may be a helping-hand for Tinycore members needing a cheap web connection.
I know many people now use free WI FI surfing ........but is there a free signal near your home?....maybe.
Sadly, with DSL, by the time you throw in the inevitable extra phone calls you make on your 18 month phone line...you have therefor committed to a minimum $1000 dollar spend from day 1..... and all you really wanted to do was surf the web at home? (your not desperate for streaming video). You can buy yourself out of contracts, but it's still expensive.
A cheap Cell phone can get you nicely connected to the web for under $30. You can also make almost free phone calls through that web connection.
In the UK, (i believe it's also true for Europe/USA) a cheap pay/go 3G cellphone will cost you maybe 30 dollars. (no contracts or other costs)
The price of cell phone data is very cheap now. ......5 bucks gets you 500 megabytes
of network data which does not expire per month. Some handsets give you 2 gigabytes for
5 bucks. (mine did)
Although Modem Tethering is not allowed with PAY/go handsets, this depends.
Unless your cell handbook specifically forbids tethering, then customers purchasing store "handsets" would never have had "forbidden tethering" revealed to them.The Sim card was factory installed.
Sim Card packet liner-notes stating "no tethering" only apply if you purchased a sim card pack yourself, saw the notes, and then set it up in your own handset.
The networks forbid pay/go internet tethering (hotspoting) .....for two main reasons.
1) The telco has already "sold" you your web data which you buy---it's for your future use on your pay/go handset..... it's already "sold data" regardless of when you actually choose to use it. .........it's an expensive data model for the telco.
2) Excessive Data eating, which is explained below.
On the other hand, cell handsets on contracts have a drip feed of "potential data" available. Contract customers may, in reality, never use a single meg of data in three months. Therefore the telco networks can buy huge chunks of "potential bandwidth" on the cheap from networks. How can they buy it thus and cheap?...well, it's from the huge monthly subscriptions they get from contract cell customers. It's a tiered model of bandwidth buying.
Is this forbidding of pay/go tethering legal? No. The telco define a modem
connection, but it's not specifically defined on my cell handbook's small-print under bluetoothe. Telco's simply paste "don't tether" on pay/go sim card packets. I did not buy any simcard packet, my sim was factory inserted and i have never been alerted to tethering via pay/go.
There is another big reason for vigillence with laptop tethering & that's excessive "data eating".
Telco's say...... pay/go are not allowed to "tether" to laptops screen's because.....
........tethering would mean that looking at a laptop webpage would pass more data than the same web page on a cell phone screen. This is NOT the case if your laptop is running the same Browser as your cell phone runs. The data passed is the same.
The trick is to use the "OPERA MINI cell phone browser" but on your laptop screen in full view.
To use Opera Mini on the laptop requires the free java emulator called "Kemulator" for win32.
The OPERA MINI browser is a free download of 400Kb. "Opera Mini.jar"
Simply open OPERA MINI inside the "kemulator" and expand the screen 5 times and go into
landscape view on your laptop. This gives you full screen laptop web surfing in style while passing NO MORE DATA than a cell phone screen would demand to display the same web page......
Buy a 30 cents blue toothe dongle from ebay. Plug the dongle to the laptop and find your
cell phone and then set up the "DUN" service. "Dial Up Networking" which is simple.
You can also make a modem web connection using the "PAN" service. The choice is yours.
You don't need Blue-toothe. A cheap cell phone with USB connection will tether to the web
and it's actually faster.(but handset handbooks may specifically say "no usb tethering")
Typical speeds are around 60Kbps for bluetoothe web surfing...it's more than
enough speed to enjoy web surfing. Detailed full-screen-laptop images (jpeg) are only
20 kilobytes of data on the OPERA MINI browser
Opera Mini on a laptop is a nice browsing experience. It's just like any other laptop browser...... such as chrome.
The data you pass to your laptop via cell phone......it's cut down 10 times if you are using the OPERA MINI browser.
You will find that 5 dollars (500 megs) of cell phone data will last you months and months of web surfing. The Money does not expire after a month.
Typically, one megabyte of cell phone data costs 1 cent .... this gives around 60 to 80 web pages on Opera Mini.
For example, doing facebook and commenting and posting stuff....1 megabyte of data will allow almost 100 of those type of actions....therefor costing, just one cent.
Don't throw your money away on 18 month phone line/DSL contracts just to get a web connection. It's a 1000 dollars waisted.....in my opinion.
A 3G cell phone is a great, reliable way, to get connected to the internet ( anywhere)
Even 2G cell phones will connect this way and can give 140kbps if HDAC enabled.
You can also watch VIDEOS on your handset's browser screen...such as youtube videos....so you are NOT cut off from streaming video while using 3G cell internet connections.
"Kemulator" can run multiple win32 instances. So you can run several java tools at the same time alongside OPERA MINI. This is extremely useful ...... there are thousands of free j2me and MIDP 2.0 apps for cell phones. But remember,
Opera Mini is one of the only "web styled tools" that commpresses
data cheaply....so
Conclusion?, you get connected to the web for next to nothing..... ......avoiding $1000 dollars DSL contracts.
Remember, once you sign up to phone line/DSL contracts you are commmitted to a 1000 dollar spend from day one. (no matter what). The cell phone idea is just 30 dollars.
The tethering is something you can judge for yourself. The question any prudent owner
would immediately ask is "why then, does my pay/go software clearly offer USB tethering?"
My handbook makes no mention of bluetoothe tethering and it's under very different telco
rules as it's part of the radio IEEE guidlines. Sim card packets say "don't tether" on the liner....and my mom said "you always play with your food, annoying". I am 800 pounds.
One other point to note is that pay/go cell phones that are 3G and on a 3G network
are always sold with an embedded web browser. This browser can't be removed and
is embedded into the OS and the chips.
When you want your cell to connect to the internet (by whatever method) it's always a good idea to first fire up the cell phone's default browser to the free welcome page, then leave it idle. This means the handset won't charge you an "internet connection fee" when you subsequently fire up your personal java browsers like OPERA MINI browser on laptop. (or on the handset).
Most cell phones are mult-tasking and multi-java-instance machines. They can run several
apps all at the same time.
I did not know about this cell web connection fee for many years .....and i believe millions still don't know about it. They don't know because i believe it's just billed to you as "using 3 megs of data" and it's hidden billing. It costs about 4 cents each time if you don't follow my guide above. (Three pence sterling.)
I asked the network about this connection fee, as it's an annual earning of around 6.5 million dollars for my network which has 13.5 million global pay/go customers. They ofcourse, denied all knowledge.
So i hope somebody may share this info when helping others who need to connect to regular cheap web surfing.
By the way, there is nothing stopping you using a regular laptop browser on your
cell connection, but it will eat data. Chrome has a free "compression proxy" like
Opera, but it still seems to eat a lot of data. Flash and other plug-ins, WILL work
and if you have "all you can eat cell data" at 15 dollars per month this may interest
you.
V
ps....many networks now allow laptop tethering on "pay/go". There was also some other things i wanted to mention.
In Opera Mini on laptop, it's best to use "low quality interpolation" in the menu of Kemulator.
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