Hi

just got back to Thailand and having decided to stay a while in the village my first shopping trip was to get myself an internet connection. Not having a clue as to whether GPRS would work out here I've opted for a minimal setup - have also learnt from fixed line internet that paying from 'premium' packages when the basic ones don't work is also pointless.

Anyway, a friend of mine suggested getting a cheap Bluetooth USB adapter to link to my Nokia 2600 which then links to AIS GPRS. I've read all the fans of DTAC but I have a DTAC and an AIS phone and here in the village the DTAC phone signal is so terrible that I have doubts if its GPRS signal is any better.

Well, the sytem works...kinda. yes it's dog-slow - at best like UK dialup. However, it does disconnect sometimes. The phone also keeps sending me unwanted crap messages (any way of switching this off?) and, most irritating of all, some websites that require logins keep kicking me off! Even Google thought I was an automated bot and refused to show me cached pages! Well, I looked at the obvious and cleared cache and cookies, but same problem. I then changed the browser internet setting to automatically detect proxy IP. This worked for all sites apart from one, which still kicks me off every few clicks.

Any advice on what's going on? Unfortunately the Bluetooth setup was done by my computer friend, who said it would take a while to configure. Now I wish I'd just sat there and watched as have no idea if he screwed up anything. If I can't solve this I'll go back but is an hour's drive away - and anyway, better to know!

I know EDGE is faster, but as I said, I don't think speed is the issue here, it seems like data losses or IP switching within a session. If I can get this to work smoothly will happily wait for real 3G to arrive in Thailand :-)

thanks

Rych

It's been a few years since I used GPRS heavily here, but AIS used a private address range for the GPRS service and went through god knows how many network address translations and proxies. Their DNS service was also pretty unstable.

I found that I could keep an SSH session open for many hours or entire days, so I ended up tunneling nearly everything through SSH to a remote server that I controlled. In addition to restoring sanity for web access, it let me run a filtering proxy and compression on the remote server, to optimize the use of the slow GPRS link.

Thanks, tho that needs further investment in a server with SSH and...perhaps more the problem...I don't really know what I'm doing at that level!

Have searched online and found I'm not the only one with this problem. Unfortunately, no real solutions I can find, apart from re-engineering how GPRS works. Also looks like the mobile phone appends an extra string to cookies but am not sure if this is the problem in this case. As I'm going through bluetooth, can I not fix a PAN IP and use that as my proxy? ...mmm... looks like a trip back to the shop :-(

rych