Mobistar on the road

One of the first things I tried when I got my cell phone, was using it to connect my laptop to internet. We happened to be on vacation in the middle of nowhere (which Limburg is to most Belgians 😉 ) so it was the ideal situation to try out my brand new GPRS subscription. 🙂 I had no idea where to start, let alone which proxy servers etc to configure. Surprisingly enough, I actually managed to find some info through the Orange World portal (which I first had to enable an account for) which, combined with some info I found on the internet with the clumsy built-in browser, enabled me to connect my Opera browser to the internet, yay!
I used the Mobile Network Wizard that came with the rest of the Sony Ericsson tools. I needed my data cable back then, but figured this was only a matter of configuration to get it going over bluetooth.

I was quite satisfied and thought if it were that easy I would use it a lot when travelling by train. Unfortunately, for months, I never managed to get the same success again! I thought I messed up my gprs settings (which could be very well the case with all the experiments I had done to get Opera Mini running) and tried out all possible combination of settings I could think of. Now, I once again have to face the truth about Mobistar: they simply suck as soon as you cross the border of a standard cell phone user (which only makes phone calls and sends SMS). It seems, about one year later, everything works just fine again. Their service was simply down. I remember the proxy telling me I was using the wrong proxy to connect to the internet. I tried all kind of APN’s and proxies. Now, I am using the exact same proxy and it works!

For all the other mobile internetting freaks out there having trouble with their Mobistar connection, here are the connection details:

APN: mworld.be
(http) proxy: 212.65.63.143 (wapgateway.mobistar.be)
proxy port: 8080
username: mobistar
password: mobistar

The easiest way to connect on windows is use the supplied Mobile Network Wizard tool. It automatically detects your phone and lets you configure and define data accounts directly on your phone. I first tried to configure a connection without my phone connected, selecting the Sony Ericsson Bluetooth modem. This didn’t seem to work. However, If I connect my cell phone through bluetooth, a standard bluetooth modem device gets added (COM10). Using this one, it works.
The MBW also automatically dials the right phone number according to the data account you selected. For example, if I use the 5th data account on my cell phone, the phone number is as follows:

*99***5#

Apart from that, you could as well set up the connection yourself, it should also work. Besides, the SE app tends to crash from time to time. 😉 But this is mostly the case when modifying or trying out some strange settings (be careful not to crash your phone). As I just mentioned, there are indeed a lot of custom settings to tweak when using the MBW tool, but I believe it’s better not to touch them. 😉

Next experiment on the list, is to try out HTTP tunneling over the mobistar proxy. As you can expect, Mobistar only supports HTTP traffic over its proxy. This basically cancels out all the fun stuff you can do on the road like controlling your remote server over SSH or chatting over some IM network. I can live with a ping of 500ms. 😉 It would be very nice if that would work. I’ll get back to you when I have the test results. 😉