Archive for the ‘Telecoms’ Category

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Expensive travels (iPhone)

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

I have been travelling a bit since I got my iPhone, and got a nasty shock yesterday when the phone was barred by O2 for having reached a billing-level of £323 above my monthly subscription. Due to a bug in the O2 web portal this level of charges were not apparent to me.

After 3 sets of emails back & forth to their (outsourced) helpdesk that left me frustrated I called the O2 iPhone customer support line. A nice Northern englishman took me through the website navigation to the right page to show me how the charges had arisen. He then surprised me by gently offering to in this instance waive the data-roaming costs incurred; as this was my first bill using the iPhone. Magic!

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iPhone

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

I got an iPhone for my birthday!

It’s a very sexy piece of kit; features I especially like are:

  • the sleek looks!
  • the behaviour of scrolling lists – love the ’springy’ behaviour
  • email support for IMAP
  • the gyroscopic sensor, which in some applications changes the view orientation
  • embedded Google Maps and YouTube applications

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Be* static IP

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

I’ve suffered with DSL modem stability & routing failures for almost 2 months, but think I may have the problem resolved at last. After I was upgraded to a static IP (as result of Be* repositioning their product range) my connection is rock-solid again.

I can only see one logical reason for this: when I was on a dynamic IP profile, the DHCP servers on Be*’s network had a MAC address clash and ignored duplicate requests – causing the router not to have an IP on its external WAN interface.

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Using a Netgear DG834G with Be*

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

After having tried my luck with 2 Thompson SpeedTouch routers (one being the Be* supplied WL780 and the other a reflashed BT HomeHub) I gave in and bought a Netgear DG834Gv3.

The relevant settings for using with Be*:

  • Basic Settings:
    • Does Your Internet Connection Require A Login? NO
    • Router MAC Address: <MAC address of previous router, or let Be* systems timeout – takes around ~40 mins)
  • ADSL Settings:
    • Multiplexing Method: LLC-BASED
    • VPI: 0
    • VPI: 101
  • WAN Setup:
    • MTU Size (in bytes): 1500

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Orangeclick.ch Mobile Internet

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

If you have a SIM from Orangeclick.ch you may run into a problem I recently experienced. The Mobile Internet option (cost: CHF5 pcm for up to 2MB, CHF2.50 per subsequent 2MB) requires the APN to be set to ‘click‘; which by default is set to ‘internet‘.

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DSL disconnections resolved

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

After repeated calls since Tuesday to our ISP, Be There, the problem was narrowed down to the router. The Thompson 716WL supplied by Be* seems susceptible to overheating in normal living room temperatures, causing intermittent drops of the connection. I replaced it with a spare BT Homehub, reflashed with Thompson 7G firmware and setup for Be*.

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POTS wiring

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Due to the desire to improve my DSL connection speed to BeThere, I took steps to investigate whether the in-house wiring was adding to the noise-floor on the line.

I thus needed to (re)work out the wiring used in UK PSTN wiring, and found the following resources online:

And a footnote, the Irish system is different from the UK system!

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Syncing my cellphone

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

I previously found Mobical for syncing my phone using SyncML, but their site seem to have gone AWOL. Looking for alternatives, I found:

  • ScheduleWorld – syncs contacts, calendar, tasks and notes. Includes integration with Google Calendar
  • ZYB

I’m having trouble syncing the 900+ contacts from my 6600 to both of them :-(

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Skype protocol

Monday, July 17th, 2006

I at one point considered producing a SIP to Skype gateway application, with a view to making it easier for corporations who do not want to let Skype loose on their protected networks to allow employees to interact with external Skype users.

The project faltered on lack of available information on the Skype protocol, but this now seems to have been resolved in a multitude of places. Charlie Paglee has a nice overview.

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Sync/backup your phone online

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

At long last, an independent means of backing up my phone without being tied to the service provider(s)!

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