The Problem of Keeping Connected
I have spent the better part of my free time in the last two days researching internet connectivity through my laptop and my cell phone. First off, does it have to be this hard? I mean, seriously Cingular... could you have hidden the information that I needed a little MORE efficiently please? It seriously took me a dozen or more well phrased google searches to even begin to get anywhere, and the pages that I needed from Cingular I found linked off of other sites. When I tried searching for them directly on their website I got nothing. According to them the pages are not available.
The whole thing comes down to a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that it IS possible, and relatively easy. Even better was the news that it is particularly easy on a Mac, mainly because of iSync, which PCs obviously lack (HA! More vindication for Mac users). Even better is that if I have a Bluetooth enabled phone I can do it wirelessly.
After another exhaustive round of web searches, which again yielded little or no information from "official" sources, but rather from news groups and message boards and the like, I began to see the bad side of the equation. It seems that there are at least 5, possibly more, types of interfaces between cellular and net technology. Cingular uses two of these: GSM and EDGE. From what I can understand a laptop and a GSM phone will yield net speeds of about 20 or 30Kbps, slower than the first dial up modem that I ever had. EDGE has the potential to get me up to 300Kbps. My phone is only capable of GSM connections. I also discovered that I might be able to get a stronger cell signal if I had a tri-mode or quad-band cell phone. Basically these phones can operate on 3 or 4 frequencies, and would search out the available ones. My current phone is dual-mode, which means of course that it only receives on 2 frequencies. My current phone also does not have Bluetooth capabilities, so I would have to be tethered to my laptop with a wire. (Can you see where all this is going?) So the bad news is that for OPTIMAL connectivity, I should probably buy a new phone. My current phone is only about 8 months old, so there is no way that they would upgrade me. I'll have to pay full price for it if I buy it.
Further bad news is that all the phones that fit these three requirements, EDGE capable, Bluetooth compatible, and tri or quad mode, are UGLY. They are all bulky, square, ugly contraptions that I will not want to lug around in my pocket when I get back to the city.
So I'm left with the dilemma of whether or not this is really necessary and advisable. I have researched all of this with an exhaustiveness that I would not have considered possible three days ago, and I have more acronyms and abbreviations and techno-babble in my head now that anyone outside of a physics lab should need to know. the next few days will tell the tale. As you can probably guess though, I am leaning pretty heavily towards a yes on all this. I just can't see myself being that disconnected for that long.
The whole thing comes down to a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that it IS possible, and relatively easy. Even better was the news that it is particularly easy on a Mac, mainly because of iSync, which PCs obviously lack (HA! More vindication for Mac users). Even better is that if I have a Bluetooth enabled phone I can do it wirelessly.
After another exhaustive round of web searches, which again yielded little or no information from "official" sources, but rather from news groups and message boards and the like, I began to see the bad side of the equation. It seems that there are at least 5, possibly more, types of interfaces between cellular and net technology. Cingular uses two of these: GSM and EDGE. From what I can understand a laptop and a GSM phone will yield net speeds of about 20 or 30Kbps, slower than the first dial up modem that I ever had. EDGE has the potential to get me up to 300Kbps. My phone is only capable of GSM connections. I also discovered that I might be able to get a stronger cell signal if I had a tri-mode or quad-band cell phone. Basically these phones can operate on 3 or 4 frequencies, and would search out the available ones. My current phone is dual-mode, which means of course that it only receives on 2 frequencies. My current phone also does not have Bluetooth capabilities, so I would have to be tethered to my laptop with a wire. (Can you see where all this is going?) So the bad news is that for OPTIMAL connectivity, I should probably buy a new phone. My current phone is only about 8 months old, so there is no way that they would upgrade me. I'll have to pay full price for it if I buy it.
Further bad news is that all the phones that fit these three requirements, EDGE capable, Bluetooth compatible, and tri or quad mode, are UGLY. They are all bulky, square, ugly contraptions that I will not want to lug around in my pocket when I get back to the city.
So I'm left with the dilemma of whether or not this is really necessary and advisable. I have researched all of this with an exhaustiveness that I would not have considered possible three days ago, and I have more acronyms and abbreviations and techno-babble in my head now that anyone outside of a physics lab should need to know. the next few days will tell the tale. As you can probably guess though, I am leaning pretty heavily towards a yes on all this. I just can't see myself being that disconnected for that long.
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