Use a Smartphone as a Dial Up Modem? | Hacker News Reader

Use a Smartphone as a Dial Up Modem?

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47 pointschatmasta13 comments

Heh, I used to use my first cellphone for dialup back in the early 2000's with T-Mobile USA. The setup was via bluetooth from a Sony Ericsson t68i (amazingly this phone still works) to a Palm Tungsten T. Then I could get a 9.6kbps connection to do IRC with it. TMUS never deployed HSCSD since it would have stressed capacity on the network (eating up more timeslots)

The reason I used this method over GPRS was that T-Mobile started to put in port blocking for their $2.99/mo T-Zones WAP plan so IRC wouldn't connect (I later on figured out I could run SSH on imap port 143 and forward through there).

I had unlimited nights and weekends and CSD used minutes, not data buckets. So what I did was connect to a free dialup provider in New England. It worked well except for dialup time and dropoffs if the signal got low.

EDIT: More recently I used a globalstar phone to mess around on IRC like the old days, also with a 9.6kbps connection BUT CONNECTED THROUGH SPACE! (pic: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8356/27784526013_bee94fd5dc_h... )

Well played! This is the same setup we used in early 00s for performing remote maintenance on our commercial hosting environments when we needed SSH or Symantec remote desktop access to Linux and Windows NT/2000 servers.

Folks don't know how terrible (#firstworldproblems) it used to be.

Huh, I used HSCSD on an Ericsson R320 (I think it even had GPRS). Slow as balls even at the time, and WAP was total shit haha.

My first cell phone had a modem option. I used it on more than one occasion to deal with emergencies that came up while I was traveling. It did operate at about 9600 baud, and was painful for anything other than ssh sessions; which was fine for what I needed to do. I mean, simple web pages would load, but it wasn't particularly enjoyable. I could also walk away and let it download my email for 20-30 minutes.

I now use 3G/4G mobile broadband for my primary internet and sometimes wish I had the option fallback to the old way; because I travel a lot in out of the way places, sometimes I have no data connectivity but voice works.

I guess that the low bandwidth is the cause of JackPair [0] silently failing on Kickstarter... Which is a pity, I really cheered for this project.

Does anyone know of any acoustic coupler implementations that actually let you smuggle data over voice?

Reading the top answer has lost me.

It starts with "No." explaining why it doesn't work and then changes it into a to "Yes, but it's slow." further down.

I didn't get their writing style either.

Fun fact, early GPRS phones usually had the computer 'dial-up' (use a DUN) using:

  *99# or *99***n# where n was the stored profile number on the device.

This was a packet, not circuit-switched connection but the computer didn't see it any differently.

I clearly remember using this to connect to the Internet via EDGE/3G on a HTC Tytn II and later a HTC Magic directly from my laptop, instead of tethering (which was against ISP ToS).

I think I'm going crazy now because none of the Android phones I've tried to replicate this on support this :/

> I think I'm going crazy now because none of the Android phones I've tried to replicate this on support this :/

They don't. Android uses usb cdc ethernet for connecting to network on devices that allow tethering. Feature phones (mostly) used PPP DUN over serial (bluetooth and I think IRDA gives rfcomm ports). A few of the later one also used the cdc_ethernet method (out of my old one.. only my K850i does)

Not dial-up, but around 2004 you could find tutorials for how to unlock your (Verizon) Razr for USB access and OS X would recognize it as a PPP modem out of the box. I think an OTA update stopped it eventually.

I wrote one of those! Fun to read through now, but highly obsolete. https://www.mikeash.com/alltel_internet.html

Anyone still uses dial-up modems? I thought I was a Luddite when I was using dial-up (56K) 15 years ago :)

Modem protocols are very robust to line quality so they should work fine over a cell phone connection though if the audio is aggressively compressed you'd get a correspondingly lower bandwidth connection. I'm not sure but I think even 56K modems would negotiate all the way down to 110bps if they had to and the newer protocols were also adaptive to line quality.

Security minded networks often use dial up to do out of band management

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