WTD: Unlimited GPRS for as cheap as possible

buglawton

Using several different money-saving components, I have now got "anywhere" Internet acccess on my laptop. It's good enough for email and essential web pages while travelling.

Costs are:

1. £10 - Ubinetics GSM GC201 pcmcia card (not GPRS) from Expansys. An XP patch (hard to find, I got it from Expanys's Dutch site) has to be manually installed, and no guarantee of compatibility hence the silly price. But it worked on my old laptop. Need to set max speed to 38 kbps or it won't connect.

2. £6 - 2nd hand o2 sim with £12 credit on it, from Ebay.

3. A pay-as-you go account with Internet Provider Tiscali which then gives FREE use of Onspeed (allowing 4 times better speed - essential).

Cost of use is: 5p/min after the 1st 3 mins at 25p/min have been used on any day. It may be 2p weekends not 5p if my used SIM was registered before Sept. 05.

It's quite usable - mainly text pages load like an old 28k modem before broadband. With highly graphical pages one needs a bit of patience but it's still usable thanks to Onspeed (Tiscali Accelerator). One can receive email using Pop3 but would need to change the outward bound mail Server to Tiscali to send emails.

seaniboy

50p outlay - sim card from the orange site and your wap enabled mobile is less expensive and faster, unlimited surfing for £1 a day ( till 12pm on day of purchase )

just one question though buglawton, are you on an old bt cellnet payg tarrif, cheap 0870/0845 access ?

i'm guessing so as doesnt Tiscali payg use 0870/0845 access which are no longer charged at standard rates with the newer o2 payg plans


even though with the old cellnet tarriff - 75p for 3 mins then standard 5 mins @ 5p = 8 mins for £1 on this slow dial up

no defo still better with orange sim in your mobile and a data cable or bluetooth connection, then use outlook to collect all your e-mails

Stabilo

seaniboy wrote:

50p outlay - sim card from the orange site and your wap enabled mobile is less expensive and faster, unlimited surfing for £1 a day ( till 12pm on day of purchase )

just one question though buglawton, are you on an old bt cellnet payg tarrif, cheap 0870/0845 access ?

i'm guessing so as doesnt Tiscali payg use 0870/0845 access which are no longer charged at standard rates with the newer o2 payg plans


even though with the old cellnet tarriff - 75p for 3 mins then standard 5 mins @ 5p = 8 mins for £1 on this slow dial up

no defo still better with orange sim in your mobile and a data cable or bluetooth connection, then use outlook to collect all your e-mails

I agree the Orange £1 per day (when YOU want it) is a great deal.

buglawton

Yes the Orange scheme seems tempting but

- Applies to GPRS access so a GPRS device is needed.
- WAP is relatively primitive. I am talking about 100% Internet Access with email sending and receiving (including using Chinese Fonts!).

Originally I did look at Orange GPRS but the pcmcia laptop cards were quite expensive compared to the £10 card I installed. And Tiscali's accelerator really does bring the speed up - probably compares well with with un-accelerated GPRS.

When Vodaphone 3G/GPRS PAYG cards start being given away with computer magazines I may upgrade.

(Already last week I noticed Voda 3g/GPRS laptop cards being given away FREE with an Acer 512MB memory/DVD rewriter package at £499 in Comet (good tft wide screen too). Tempting but I'm stony broke right now! The 3g card is Pay As You Go with a tariff of £5/MB).

seaniboy

orange 3g/gprs card software has an inbuilt accelerator ( my nokia n70 is just as fast as data card on 2G) - i use mine with my 2G payg sim for full access only cost £40 from sleebay

£1 a day deal is wap or full internet,and quicker than my dial up

model of mobile phone do you have buglawton?





plus you can send texts via your data card/mobile

top-up/free texts

£10-300 £20-600 £30-1000

or 3000 off peak evenings & weekends for £15



15 days data & 3000 texts does me great

buglawton

Interesting that you should say that Orange 3g has an inbuilt accelerator. My brother-in-law got the Orange 3g/gprs laptop card recently and his Orange tariff is data amount related. Quite expensive if you exceed the package amount in a month. Once he got onspeed installed his data per same amount of surfing dropped by 80 percent (stats can be monitored) which saves very big money and surfs a bit faster too.

seaniboy

well i now use the inbuilt orange accelerator with propel accelarator (free 3 months) and google one too! they all work together great

model of mobile phone do you have buglawton?

reason i ask is you can get a sim on orange for 50p or i can find new one lying about for you to try it out if your mobile is compatible, i use a dial up modem in Holiday inn which costs me 50p connection to a internet freephone number 0808 but Travelodge charges me 20p a min to freefone!!!

Sheraton was similar to Travelodge, so be careful! Hilton I cant remember as I never used it on last visit

Even if you are happy with your set-up carry a spare orange sim just in case you visit a hotel that charges a fortune, & pop it into your mobile if needs be

Try a orange 2g sim in your BIL data card after buying the orange extra " one days unlimited orangeworld access " the sim auto defaults to 2G so 3G does not conflict after 1st minute for me, or the mobile connetion to laptop is great with onspeed too!

the data is compressed before its sent to you that why onspeed works good, a small percentage is picked up by orange rather than the full measurement they would send direct uncompressed ( i think orange decompresses after thier server perhaps on the laptop software to speed up the page loading on screen, of course with thier own intrests not yours ! ), i thought it would be a breach of thier T&C at least on data plans but when i set it up for me on payg but cant find anything on thier site

I carry my unlocked o2 n70 with orange sim in it for unlimited wap & radio streaming while walking about/ ipaq usage, and off peak texting & link it up when needs be - 1 cable & 1 connect button, off peak & stationary i put sim in the data card for easy texting from the laptop with the keyboard and bobs your uncle before orange knew it they regreted the 3000 free texts promo ( yes they tried to move me off it ! )

I remember you saying about your BIL in a pm, I hope things are better for him & the festive period was bearable for him in hospital:)

buglawton

The offer of an Orange SIM to try would be tempting but I don't have a 2g/GPRS modem!

My method is DIAL-UP old style and I pay by the minute - 5p after the 1st 3.

As I said, I did try to go for a GPRS 2g modem but at the time I was looking they were fetching £40 on Ebay while the Ubinetics GSM card I actually use - does dialup - was £10 from Expansys. The purpose is mainly a comfortable email service on the move eg hotels with occasional web page lookup. I only came upon this method as a side effect of researching the topic for my BIL (he's bearing up well BTW) who went 3g in the end.

seaniboy

buglawton are you sure your mobile phone doesnt have a modem?

most mobiles that have wap can be used for full internet access as they have a gprs device inside, even some of the most basic mobiles have a gprs or dial up modem


name your mobile & model and I will research it for you

Stabilo

buglawton and seaniboy,

I hadn't realised buglawton didn't have GPRS with the phone. As seaniboy states many (even old) phones have inbuilt GPRS.

Stabilo

seaniboy wrote:

buglawton are you sure your mobile phone doesnt have a modem?

most mobiles that have wap can be used for full internet access as they have a gprs device inside, even some of the most basic mobiles have a gprs or dial up modem


name your mobile & model and I will research it for you