(Saga follows) Here was the story up to date. Our company switched from Cingular to Sprint, and got these phones that can do everything but your taxes, but have a battery life of 6.2 seconds. I got a Samsung N400. Our Sprint rep told me a little story...
Appearantly when Vision first came out, they hyped the ability to use your phone as a modem and have unlimited data per month. They sold an adapter for $70 to do this job. Later they came out with a PCMCIA card that 1) did the equivalent of the phone+cable, and 2) required you to get a new phone account (the card was the account, no phones or anything could be added onto it), and charged things like 40MB/mo for $40 or unlimited for $100/mo. But nobody bought them. Gee, wonder why. To solve this problem, Sprint ordered the manufacturers to stop creating the data cables. But the service plans still said "free data", since all that left you with was the in-phone browser. Well, a 3rd party created USB data cables for several Sprint phones. The cable for my phone was $20, which I found at Radioshack. I installed the windows software, and with a little reverse engineering, figured out how it worked. The drivers create something that looks exactly like a modem. This modem can be used as any other modem can, except the connections are limited to 14.4k. However, if you set up a DUN connection to dial #777 and start an unauthenticated PPP connection, it goes into packet switching mode and uses sprint's network, and the connection is up to 128k/128k. Latency is an issue though, anywhere between 300ms and 800ms. But it's still very usable. I thought "cool, but there probably aren't drivers for linux". But I was wrong. I plugged it into my redhat system and examined dmesg. The USB system detected it and used the ACM device, which uses /dev/input/ttyACM0 (on redhat; looks like debian is just /dev/ttyACM0). Again, this looks like any other serial port connected to a modem. So I dial #777, fire up pppd and I'm online! I found this page: http://www.natecarlson.com/linux/sanyo-4900.php - which goes into greater detail about everything (Sanyo is mentioned a lot, but the process was nearly identical for my Samsung). If you have Sprint Vision, this is a good, free (for the time being) option. And if it's anything like the PCMCIA card (which it sounds like it is), it should be very reliable. I demoed the PCMCIA card a few months ago by starting ping and driving home, a 5 mile route that goes through trees, around a hill, etc. Only 2 packets lost. RF _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
