GPRS + Bluetooth on FreeBSD (was: Support for Xircom CreditCard Bluetooth adapter?)

[Tobias Roth]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 01:27:56PM -0700, Maksim Yevmenkin wrote:

> unrelated to the topic: i would like to know about people's experiences with
> GPRS + Bluetooth on FreeBSD. is it usable in real life or more like a toy?
> what it your usage of such configuration in the real life? what is the price
> range? what is the normal speed? is GPRS connection stable? is GPRS coverage 
> any good? is that a reasonable configuration for road warrior type scenario? 

works well enoufh for me. The speed is something between a 33.6 and a 56k
modem, so it's what was using for quite some time before I got lucky
enough to get a cable connection.

i use it mostly for looking up information on the web and for mailing.

as for the price of access and transfer, I am again lucky enough to get
it free from my employer.
otherwise, it'd be expensive as hell: $7.5/MB and $3.25/Month base tax.
different price models double the monthly fee and half the cost per MB
(better, but still expensive).

the stability of the connection seems good, although I have only used it
for a couple of days so far. the same goes for the coverage, though 
since I live in a very small country, it is usually well covered,
particularly along the railway tracks and highways.

to sum it up, at least for the time it's free for me, it's a very handy
thing to have. definitely more than a toy. when I will have to pay again
(or even before, to improve speed), maybe a gzipping, ad-blocking proxy
combined with a local http and dns cache and of course imap will help.