07.08.07

Mobile - Configure your PC to use ANCEL’s Internet plan

Posted in Hacks, Mobile at 9:23 pm by cphoton

For those that are using the $U 70 / month ANCEL’s service for Internet navigation, I’ve got good news for you. You can use your mobile as a modem from your PC, PDA or any other device that supports dial-up connections. Here are the steps to do that:

  1. If you have not already have done so, create a GPRS profile on your mobile with the following characteristics:
    • Name: wapANCEL (you can change this if you want, but take it into account when I refer to it later in the post)
    • APN: wap
    • Proxy type: HTTP
    • Proxy: 200.40.246.2
    • Port: 3128
    • All other settings: blank

    The proxy might be optional, but take it into account when you use your browser.

  2. Connect your mobile to your PC using Bluetooth, Infrared, etc.
  3. Run the +CGDCONT? command on your modem. On Windows, this can be done by going to Control Panel / Phone and Modem Options / Modems, then select your Mobile’s modem (if it’s not there, add it first), then go to Properties / Diagnostics / Query modem. Then click on the “View Log” button. A Notepad window should appear like this:

    bt-modem.png

    Notice the two lines highlighted. The first one says that wapANCEL is the wap profile number 6, and the other line is a special line we will use in the next step.

  4. Still on the Modem Properties Window, go to Additional parameters / Additional initialization string and add:
    • AT+CGDCONT=6,”IP”,”wap”,”0.0.0.0″,1,1 (note that the string after AT is the special line I highlighted before, change the semi-colon for an equals though!). This tells the modem to use the wap APN, use the IP assigned from the server, and use compression.
  5. Now, create a new network connection with the following characteristics:
    • Phone number: *99***X# (X is the number of the wap profile you created, in this case, as the wapANCEL profile is the profile number 6, the number would be *99***6#)
  6. Connect to the internet using your mobile’s network connection.
  7. Configure your browser to use the HTTP Proxy defined on step 1 (200.40.246.2, port 3128)
  8. Enjoy :)

One last thing, the proxy only allows HTTP and HTTPS traffic, if you want to use POP3 or other protocols you will need the data transfer plan, which does not have those restrictions but is more expensive.