I still use GPRS often as WiFi coverage is not always
good in the suburbs around my city. I have a basic
SonyEricsson mobile phone that doubles as a GPRS
modem for my laptop. I wrote about the quality service T-Com
provides and GPRS is no exception; I pay 3$ per 10MB of
traffic. Using Opera Mini on your phone maybe you could
stretch that trough the month but otherwise it's the amount of traffic
I generate in an hour of browsing and reading e-mail... so what could
I do to save bandwidth?
First let's cover the basics. Once you connect your phone with
an USB cable besides standard USB core modules you will also
need cdc-acm and ppp-generic modules. For a PPP
dialer you can
use wvdial
or KPPP (provided by KDE). I use wvdial which
is set up like this:
; wvdial configuration ; /etc/wvdial.conf ; ; T-Com Web'n'Walk [Dialer wnw] baud = 115200 Modem = /dev/ttyACM0 Dial Command = ATD Carrier Check = no Init = at+cgdcont=1,"IP","web.htgprs" Phone = *99***1# Username = none Password = noneYou can initiate a connection with:
# wvdial wnwOnce connected I could barely open a few pages (not to mention that the general connection speed is pathetic) so I started thinking about saving bandwidth. The first thing I setup was SSH as a SOCKS proxy, with compression enabled. Further I considered adding a HTTP caching proxy to my home router such as Privoxy which has great filtering capabilities, so I could strip not only ads but maybe even all images and further modify and twist the traffic... I can't be the first person thinking about these issues yet all web searches came up empty. Or, they did until I found the Toonel service this winter. Their client routes all your traffic trough their servers while compressing it, and additionally they run a caching proxy. Their client is cross-platform and it works for a number of protocols, seems to be exactly the solution I was thinking of...
$ ssh -C -D 40000 somehost.tldI then have a SOCKS proxy running on localhost port 40000 which many applications directly support (Firefox, Gajim...) and tsocks can be used for apps that don't. Argument "-C" enables compression and it saves me some bandwidth in the long run. I know many people tweaked network settings of Firefox (or use Fasterfox) to gain speed, but you might consider a more conservative set of rules when using GPRS because it could backfire on you.