The Wonders of GPRS

Some weeks ago I temporarily moved to Stavanger, on the west-coast of Norway. I am living in an apartment without any sort of network connection, not even a phone-line. As a very "online" person it does not feel very good to be totally disconnected from the time I go home from work until the day after.

Naturally; for extremely short connections I can use GSM dial-up with HSCSD, which gives a decent connection speed, but at indecent rates.

So, yesterday I had gotten to a point where I needed to resolve this situation so that I atleast get cheap instant messaging and e-mail. The solution was to upgrade my cellular phone from a Nokia 6210 to a 6310i -- the latter with GPRS support. It took some hours to get the phone online through GPRS dial-up as the accompanying CD did not include the correct installation information file (INF). But when the correct driver was downloaded from Nokia it all worked like a charm.

The difference between GPRS and GSM dial-up in this setting is that GPRS is charged by the kilobyte and not by the second -- very useful for long connections with little or no data transfer.) If one starts to download webpages, or graphics or anything like that it becomes equally expensive, but all-in-all I spent some 3 hours online for a total cost of $2.50 using instant messaging, e-mail and a few web-lookups.

Just wonderful...

Posted by ludvig at September 12, 2003 04:31 PM | TrackBack