Carl Hutzler’s Blog

I recently switched from Cingular to Sprint. I had been a Cingular customer for over two years but recently had become unhappy with the quality of calls, disconnects, and coverage.

I went to Sprint because they have:

a) Roaming on VZW and VZW has always had amazing coverage in the strangest places

b) Sprint had nights/weekends starting at 7pm included

c) Sprint offered an add on to let me use my EVDO/Bluetooth phone as a modem to connect to the Internet which is very useful for my businesses for $40 for unlimited.

I have been using the Phone as Modem (PAM) now for about a month and it is very good. Speed is usually between 160 and 400 kbps over my bluetooth connection to my Mac Book Pro laptop. I think it could be a bit faster if I did it via USB, but this is fast enough for me and convenient.

Anyway, the one frustrating part is that the modem disconnects all the time. I can rarely get more than 5-10 minutes before a disconnect happens. I searched around recently and found a few sites which mentioned the issue. I found one post by “Maximilian” that solved the problem. Maximilian guessed that Sprint had a very aggressive auto bump program which would bump you if you did not transmit data for a minute or so. And he is right. I tested it myself and if I was idle for about 60s, bump. If I opened my terminal and just had an endless PING going, I would stay on for very long periods without issue.

Maxmimilian wrote a small PHP script to do auto-refresh of a webpage on his site which would cause a little traffic to be sent every 15 seconds or so. This works well if you don’t want to do a constant PING in the terminal. Instead of use his webpage, I wrote a similar one on my site:

Refresh.php