Online via Cingular Wireless, Bluetooth and Motorola V551

A minor victory, but something which portends a very exciting future.

Thanks to these instructions from Jim Charanis I found via Google, I have managed to successfully connect to the Internet with:

• A Motorola V511 Cell phone
• my Cingular wireless phone service
• a Macintosh Powerbook G4

I called Cingular’s data support network line (866.490.2666) and they gave me some configuration instructions, but those did not work… Jim’s did however. (The phone number or GPRS CID STRING needed to be changed.) I also had to make several configuration setting changes (minor things but very important) that Jim has detailed on his page.

Unfortunately, the connection speeds upstream and downstream that I was able to connect with via the cell phone were not fast enough for an iChat interactive videoconference. But this development portends (“To indicate by prediction; forecast) very exciting things. It suggests in the not too distance future, people will be able to:

• be online with high speed Internet access anywhere there is cell coverage
• be able to teach or take an online class from almost anywhere
• be able to videoconference with anyone on the planet (connected with a high speed Internet connection) from just about anywhere…

Very exciting! I captured some graphs of the bandwidth comparisons of cell phone connection versus WiFi and wired Internet connections, I’ll be posting those to Flickr soon.