Not Necessarily Interesting News

After much trials and tribulations I got my laptop with a bluetooth dongle talking to my cell phone which connects to Cingular and gives mobile Net access. I knew it was possible and Cingular’s site even makes it sound easy. It took me 3 days and 2 hours on the phone with Cingular’s 2nd level support to get it working.
I’m heading on vacation soon and while I’m gone I’ll still need to log in and do some work from the boat. Instead of heading in to a marina and trying to find a phone jack I thought I’d try to get my bluetooth phone to do what it’s supposed to be capable of. I attached my D-Link DBT-120 dongle and got it to tether to the phone, a Motorola v551, without problem. After playing with init strings I even got Dialup Networking to dial the phone. It kept hanging at ‘Registering you computer with the network’ and then throwing ‘Error 31’ whatever that means. I played with it for a while and finally called Cingular.
After wading through the front line support I got to someone who seemed to know what he was doing. He found that the data access part of my plan was provisioned wrong. It took him an hour with the provisioning folks to get things set and *bam* I was online.
Details:
The modem init string their site and support guys told me to use

at+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”isp.cingular”

did not work. I used

&f&d2&c1+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”isp.cingular”

as suggested on other sites and it worked.
The number their page says to use is also not what their phone guys said. The page say

*99#

and phone support said

*99***1#

. The phone guy was right.
There’s conflicting info on the net about the login name. I used

ISP@CINGULARGPRS.COM

with password

CINGULAR1

I did some tests this morning on the way to work. It’s not blazing speed but for email and light websurfing it’s fine. I hit a couple speed test sites and was averaging around 130kbps/down and 32kbps/up. Not bad while moving down the freeway at 60mph.