In a follow-up to my post about 64bit Linux and Vodafone 3G Dongles, here’s how I got it working under 32bit linux:
I’m currently connected using my 3G dongle under Ubuntu 8.04 (32bit) - everything is working fine.
After a little bit of work and a strange error, I managed to get one of Vodafone’s Huawei E172 USB 3G dongles working with 64-bit Ubuntu.
I used the 2.0beta3 AMD64 drivers (I’ll be trying the i386 ones on my laptop later), however the device, whilst detected, would never connect - it would always immediately hang up after CHAP authentication.
Digging around it became apparent that if an incorrect APN is used, the connection will either hangup immediately, or bad IP addresses will be delivered.
So, here’s the details needed:
APN: Internet (with a capital “I”)
Using this APN with the provided username, password and dial number, and the 20betas3 Vodafone Mobile Connect software I was up and running pretty much straight away.
Kudos to Vodafone for making the effort to release a Linux version of their connection software.
Cross posted from The Mobile Weblog.
I've vacillated between two schools of thought about this topic, but the one I keep coming back to relates to the underlying principles of capitalism, where Sprint are well within their rights to terminate any customer for pretty much any reason - they are, after all not in the business of providing communication service, but the business of making money for their shareholders. They just happen to be making money by providing communication services.
It can also be argued that the actions Sprint are taking in churning these customers off their books is beneficial to the company's bottom line, as it reduces the number of support calls, and hence the amount of money spent on providing such support. It also has a minor side effect of decreasing the number of accounts with billing problems (which are the primary cited reason for the high number of calls), which should have the impact of increasing revenues again.
Of course, weighed against this is the negative impact that all the exposure has generated across the Internet, and amongst mobile bloggers especially where the response has been almost universally negative. Ars Technica even popped up with their own experience.
Again, I can't help but think there is no real big issue here, there's simply a dispute between customers and the company they are purchasing a service from. Individual instances where customers are being mischarged, overcharged or generally billed for goods or services they didn't use aside, if Sprint choose to terminate a customer's service at no penalty to the customer, then that's their prerogative.
Sprint have however managed to shoot themselves in the foot by instigating another such customer purge, this time adversely affecting a group of US servicemen and women, by penalising them for using Sprint's own roaming service.
A few days after the original story appeared, another appear on The Consumerist with what appeared to be a rebuttal from Sprint, although delivered as if from a Sprint employee reporting anonymously, that claimed that the majority of the people who's accounts were being terminated were actually attempting to defraud Sprint. Consumerist reader ScoobyDoo was one of many who was less than trusting of the veracity of the account:
I call shenanigans.This guy is probably speaking on behalf of Sprint PR and is trying to slow down the backlash they got from their little stunt.
They probably thought they could fire these 1000 customers without anyone noticing, but forgot about the Internet.
The story he's telling may apply to a couple of customers, but the previous poster proves that not everyone was a scammer, and Sprint should be ashamed of itself for trying to pin the blame on their customers when it is evident that THEY are also to blame in some cases.
Although balanced against this, other posters such as BNET41 say:
If you've ever worked as a CSR you'd know how common this is. There seem to be people out there who have nothing better to do than try to get free stuff.
In all of this, the one party that has yet to make a public announcement is Sprint itself, or at least not anywhere I've seen.
What I do think this situation shows is not that Sprint are necessarily a bad company (although there will always be debate about this), it seems to show there is a fundamental disconnect in the US mobile telecommunications industry, something that is also shown in the recent release of Apple's iPhone as an AT&T exclusive. With each company working hard to generate as much income for their shareholders as possible, the US-wide communications infrastructure is suffering, and consequently customers are having a hard time making use of such services. The original poster on the SprintUsers forum makes the point that whilst serving in Iraq - effectively a warzone - he received a better standard of service and operational coverage, at a lesser price, than he receives from the US telecommunications provider Sprint.
Why on earth I cant get coverage at the United States Military Academy, 40 minutes away from New York City is a mystery to me. I had a cell phone the entire time I was in Iraq with a middle eastern company. I payed LESS to call home and keep in touch from the otherside of the world than I do now with Sprint to call within the country. It also did not matter if I was in a major city or out in the middle of nowhere in the desert, I ALWAYS had full coverage. Never had a dropped call, and the customer reps of that company spoke better English than those with Sprint do.
It is this small section of the post that caught my attention and got me thinking - how can it be that in such a technologically advanced country, obtaining cellphone coverage, roaming and interconnects between existing providers is such a problem?
I remember myself when I used to employ people living in the US I always had to check in advance where in the country they would be to make sure that I could call them. In some cases, depending on location, I couldn't call as their carrier didn't provide international inbound call connectivity in certain regions. In some, especially to me, ludicrous instances I couldn't even send a text message, as there was no text sharing interconnect between carriers for roaming users, a situation that appears to still exist.
More than 30 million viewers tune in to 'America Idol' each week to vote for their favorite contestants by dialing into the toll-free telephone numbers or texting in on their Cingular Wireless phones.
To expand on that small quote - you can only vote for American Idol is you have a Cingular mobile phone. If you're on any other network, you cannot send in a voting text.
The equivalent situation in the UK would have the text voting provider laughed out of business, yet this seems to be the norm in the US.
Apple going with AT&T for the iPhone has also struck many people as odd, for the same reason: AT&T use a proprietary technology to deliver mobile services that is entirely incompatible with every other provider. Sprint phones are also incompatible with other providers, so those who are using Sprint are also locked in to that carrier if they want to continue using the handsets they have bought - and perhaps that is the real reason for the angst, not that the service is bad (which it apparently is), or that the company is doing what it is legally obliged to do (make money for it's shareholders), it's the fact there's no other choice that is driving the anger.
So I really think the larger issue here is not Sprint, but the parlous state of the mobile telecoms industry in the US. Common shortcodes (5 or 6 digit codes that work on all carriers) are a new phenomenon in the US (only being introduced in the past couple of years), and number portability is still a large issue. Coverage varies depending on your provider, and some areas you are limited in which provider you can even choose. Sprint dumping users is just a symptom of a much wider malaise.
Well, this was certainly unexpected! It seems that the Mobile Weblog (which is the blog I write for on occasion) has been named in The Times’ list of 50 Best Business Blogs!
Internet blogs are taking on big corporations and winning. As the bloggerati continue to set the agenda Times Online provides the first full list of the 50 top blogs, corporate and anti-corporate alike.
Guess I’ll have to post some more now!
I posted this over at the Mobile Weblog earlier today:
As many of you will know, for the past 9 months or so I have been working hard on the Pitch Mobile Social Network, a mobile service that takes the best of sites like Myspace, Flikr and Youtube and mashes them all into a single site you can access seamlessly via your mobile or the Web. Pitch includes multiple types of chat, between mobile and web, picture and video uploading, sharing, commenting and rating, with all formats converted to both mobile and web to allow users to watch mobile video in their browser, or easily upload web video to download to their phone.Now the parent company has decided to focus on other aspects of their subscription-based mobile content business, and not on the social networking aspects, which means the time has come for me to move on.
So, I’m currently accepting offers of freelance or other work! Drop me line to say hello regardless, and let me know what you thought of Pitch - I’m very proud of the service I developed.
Update: Mike over at Tbites has posted about my departure, with a scary picture of me!
Update 2: Ewan at SMS Text News has also posted, saying nice things about me.
I took my first tentative, real steps away from using Microsoft Windows last night by installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on a partition on my laptop. I’ve been playing with Ubuntu through Wubi, the disk-file installer for Ubuntu that lets you install and run the Linux OS under Windows.
But this is different: I’ve cleaned out a block of space on my hard drive, wiped out the old Windows partition, and installed Ubuntu natively - so I now have a dual-boot laptop.
The installation went very smoothly and was complete in about 20 minutes. After install, there were 5 updates, for a total of a 3Mb download, and everything just worked straight away - even my onboard ATI graphics card. So of course I installed Beryl for a bit of eye-candy. And again, it installed and ran first time.
The only issue I have is with my wireless networking card, but that’s not Ubuntu’s fault - by default the OS does not come with WPA support, and I happen to run WPA encryption on my wireless LAN and I had the same problem when I was running under Wubi. So once the final piece of software is installed, I’ll be up and running with a dual-boot wireless laptop.
One really interesting thing I’ve come across already is the way Ubuntu configures my laptop trackpad. By default it maps the right-hand edge to vertical scroll (with the bottom edge horizontal scroll), allowing me to scroll up and down by sliding my finger on the pad, rather than using mouse buttons. I cannot, for the life of me, get this working natively under Windows.
Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, Beryl, Microsoft, Windows, Windows XP, Linux
I’m off to Munich next week, where I’ll be chairing day 2 of the Fixed-Mobile Convergence Summit organsied by IIR Conferences, so if you’re in the area or attending the conference, say hello!
Pitch has been mentioned in a report from 3GSM on CNN. Check out the top video on the CNN website, along with the third to last paragaph…
The website to accompany the pitch Mobile Network service has now gone live. Any Pitch member can set up a password using their mobile and then access almost all of Pitch through the web.
With the launch of the website, there are some added features available:
Cross-platform chat
Video upload, sharing & commenting
Image upload, sharing & commenting
Mixed content albums
Blogging
WAP site persanalisation
To translate slightly: You can, using your PC, chat with your friends who are on their mobile, and vice versa. You can also upload almost any video or picture (OK, we limit you to 2Mb or smaller file size) from your PC and then download it to your mobile - we do all the conversion for you, free of charge.
All the chatting & commenting functions you can do on your mobile you can also do on the web, and anything you do on the web will also appear on mobile.
Pitch members automatically get a URL that is unique as well - mine is www.pitch.mobi/cro - which is very easy to remember, as it’s my Pitch Tag!
And best of wall, there’s no client to download to your phone - as long as you phone supports WAP, you can access Pitch :)
Pitch, the social networking site I’ve been working on since last August, has been nominated for an award!
Pitch has been shortlisted for the MoMo Global Peer Awards. From the Mobile Monday website:
Pitch, the UK’s first advertising-funded mobile content provider, has launched a brand new service offering users a fully-interactive entertainment community on their mobile handsets. Bringing the Web 2.0 social networking phenomenon to the mobile phone, Pitch’s new service features instant messaging, photo and video upload and sharing as well as access to an exciting new online community. Through the new service, Pitch customers can build their own mobile home page, complete with a unique user name and inbox, allowing them to send messages to friends or groups, as well as participating in real time group chat with other Pitch members. Thus users can create and join interest groups, enabling them to stay in touch with old friends or meet new people with similar interests - all through their mobile phones. Pitch does not charge for this service, so the only costs users incur come from data charges, making instant communication significantly cheaper than sending a text through a network operator.
Woo!
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| The last book I contributed to. |
Copyright 1998-2005 Tom Gordon
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