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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be cool if you could use your cellphone instead of using a data plan?

Dial-up over a cell call? It's called CSD (Circuit switched data), and it tops out at ~9.6Kbps if I remember correctly.

And isn't available on many networks these days.

There was briefly a thing called HSCSD ("high-speed circuit switched data"), which allowed for 14.4k per circuit, and you could make two simultaneous connections to get 28.8k. It was basically ISDN over GSM.

But you paid per minute (twice as much for 28k) and it was swiftly killed off by GPRS.

Used this way back in the day when we got rid of our landline phone (this was around 2000), used my Kyocera phone as a modem to dial into our Earthlink service. Since we had unlimited night and weekend calling we primarily used the internet around then, oh boy was downloading Windows NT SP6 back then fun.

>There was briefly a thing called HSCSD

That was never deployed commercially in the US, it tied up too many channels. I was able to use CSD on T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless back in the day.

Worked well enough during unlimited nights and weekends to get on IRC.

A few years ago I needed a way to SSH onto a dial-up server during a trip. Since hotspot was still an add-on, I bought a cheapie $15 Verizon prepaid flip phone and used that with a USB cable. It appeared as a serial modem under Linux.

The amusing thing was that apparently Verizon didn’t setup any sort of billing for my use-case, and since I never used the voice or text the thing just continued to work for a couple of years. It worked after the service cancelled, after the number was reclaimed, and then finally stopped only once the SIM card would no longer register on the network.

Not that I really cared - it was 9600 baud and I only used it a handful of times. Still a funny hack.

I was actually thinking of this recently. People have:

* unlimited minutes,

* limited mobile data,

* many don't use their home phone, and

* their home internet is rate limited instead of data limited

So, what's stopping anyone (besides know-how) from getting unlimited (albeit slow) data by making a call to one's home computer, and using it as a proxy to get access to one's home internet service from anywhere?

All one needs is something to hookup their home computer to a phone-line.

The data is so slow in modern-day terms that it wouldn't make a dent in their mobile-data cap anyway. We're talking 9600 baud, or 9.6kbps, for data over the mobile voice channel. Now, SSH'ing (or RDP'ing, for that matter) to their home pc over mobile data and doing data-intensive tasks through that channel is something that should be a lot more common than it is.

Hmm - I just recently picked up a couple of TRS-80 Model 100 machines...

...and I am pretty certain I still have one or two old MultiTechs.

I need another project like I need a hole in my head.

Fair use agreements usually. You'd probably have someone asking "Are you using your personal plan for business use" or similar.

Are they listening to the content of my phone calls? Because if not, I'm just a guy who has talks on the phone a lot.

I know people who talk on the phone for hours and hours. Doing so should be well within the realm of normal consumer use!

I can't think this would be very useful business-wise. The more likely uses I'm thinking of are when you need something from the internet in an emergency and you don't have anymore data for the month, or when your internet-needs can be satisfied with a terminal and you want to save those extra bucks every month.

Back in college I did exactly this. It was 2004, I couldn't afford a data plan, but my school had a dialup service for resnet and I had free nights+weekends on my cell phone. I spent a lot of family RV trips in the passenger seat with my laptop using my cell phone as an analog modem over Bluetooth, getting free internet access at 9600 bits per second (nominally, slower in reality) browsing with images disabled because otherwise it was just unusable.

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