Vanuatu IT Users Society

I’ve been playing with a Digicel GPRS modem for the last few days, and thought I’d share some initial impressions.

To me, a computer without Internet access feels like a car without wheels. Trotting around town with my GPRS-enabled laptop has made me realise just how many ways the Internet supplements my daily existence. Technical disputes with my kava-drinking buddies are resolved in a flash. (“Dude, railway ties are so treated with creosote. So there.”) My extended family can keep track on what their friends overseas are up to. The opportunities to learn are immense, too. (True story: someone asked me how tall a giraffe is. For the first time ever, I was able to say, “Hang on. I’ll show you.”)

That said, GPRS is far better suited to intermittent connectivity than staying online full-time. A quick facebook update here, an email there – that sort of thing. But compared to the amount of Internet available throughout most of the country (i.e. none) I’ve got to say it’s pretty darn cool to have it when you need it.

Read on for the geeky details.

NOTE: Take everything I say with a grain of salt – I’ve only just started this evaluation, so I reserve the right to be very, very wrong on some or all what follows….

1) Windows

I had mixed results getting the Nokia GPRS USB dongle working on Windows. The dongle comes with all the software you need stored on it, so all I had to do was wait for it to mount itself as a CD device and let autorun do its magic. There are some obvious security issues here, but to its credit, the Nokia device did mount as read-only, so the odds of it getting infected (or passing on malware) is low.

The first machine I installed on – a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop – went smooth as silk, although the software complained about wanting Service Pack 3.

Installing on a VMWare virtual machine (SP2) ended up causing blue screens and never worked. I attribute this to the fact that the version of Windows I was installing on is not at all up-to-date (I normally run it sandboxed with no network connection at all).

A huge problem on Windows is that so many applications install updater services that automatically start downloading stuff the moment you’re online. I found that the laptop I tried kept transferring data at a more or less constant rate. If you leave the modem connected for any length of time that could get very pricy indeed.

To its credit, the Nokia software has an always-on-top bandwidth usage monitor. It calculates the total download and upload volume, as well as the total (this is what you get billed on). There’s also a rather rudimentary usage history chart available as well which shows you a summary of all your recent sessions, but unfortunately doesn’t offer summary totals.

While the session monitoring applet claimed speeds in excess of 40 Kilobits/second, I found that the modem felt slower than my 128Kbps DSL line at home. (More on this below….)

Nonetheless, I became very popular indeed when I was able to wander around the Freswota and Namburu neighbourhoods, laptop in tow, and download photos of all my family and friends on demand. (Strictly speaking it would have been vastly less expensive and much more efficient to put them on a USB stick, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise.)

2) Linux

Getting the modem working on Linux was a little more challenging. The Modem took the same approach as it did on Windows, opening itself as a CD device and featuring a clear instruction sheet accompanied by a simple install script.

The only problem was that whoever developed the install routine just assumed that the correct kernel modules would be loaded already. It took a few hours of digging around to find out why my modem just sat there doing nothing. I’ll be submitting a bug report to Nokia to fix this.

BUT, once the kernel module issue was addressed, using the modem was actually easier in Ubuntu (9.04) than in Windows. As with so many things these days, it just worked. I plugged in the modem and Ubuntu’s Network Manager found it within seconds, dialed the connection and established a session with a single click. Very cool.

I used my conky desktop monitor script to measure total bandwidth as well as download and upload rates. I did see a very brief peak of 14Kbps at one point, but longer downloads seem to peg at about 4-6 Kpbs (much slower than dial-up). Of course, if you’re using GPRS to download large files, you’ll have other fish to fry. The costs alone might kill you.

3) Mac

Once again, the Nokia’s install routine was about as easy as it could reasonably be made. I opened a Finder window, found the USB modem already mounted. Double-clicked on the installer package, and followed the instructions. Easy Peasy.

The software interface, as with many things on the Mac, is much more polished, albeit with fewer features than the Windows version. I could always geek right out and install the same monitoring tools as I used on Linux. But even without those deep forensics, I found the experience (and performance) was much the same as on Windows and Linux, with the exception of a brief failure to finish loading one web page (probably purely coincidental, but it was the Skype.com home page).

All in all, there’s a definite case to be made for the convenience of being able to check email more or less from anywhere, and it’s nice to be able to look up information at the drop of a hat.

I won’t comment on the costs just yet, but let me assure you that this will not be a replacement for a full-time, dedicated Internet account any time soon.