Motorola StarTAC Digital Data Microbrowser

Comments? ryang@trideja.com

The Motorola StarTAC has the cool ability to connect it to the computer, and use it as a circuit-switched wireless modem. Depending on your provider, you will get either 9600bps, or 14,400bps over the wireless link. You can dial any landline modem data number, and it is extremely reliable, and uses the same amount of battery power as a digital voice call. The data cable even has a jack on the side of the phone connector, so you can even charge the phone while it is connected to a computer or PDA.

It may be technically incorrect to call the phone a 'modem' while on a digital data call, because it is more like an ISDN terminal adapter - it merely converts the serial data from the computer into the form needed to pass over the packetized digital CDMA network. The beauty of this is that you can utilize you're full channel bandwidth for data transmission and reception. When you dial a regular land-line modem or ISP number, the service provider will have one of their land-line modems make the call to the other modem. This process takes between 20 to 30 seconds to setup the call before your computer receives the 'connect' message and can begin to transfer data, but you used 20 to 30 seconds of airtime to wait for the land-line modems to connect.

This may be just fine if you are connecting to a service that is only accessible via modem, but if you are connecting to the Internet, you can use a feature that many CDMA service providers offer, called 'Quick Net Connect'. This feature allows you to connect to an Internet connection provided by the mobile company, within about three seconds, and without a pair of land-line modems in between. This also reduces the latency of the connection to about half of the other method, and saves waiting for the modem negotiation!

Once connected, you will see a screen similar to that on the right, which will show you the current data transfer mode, the number dialed, connect time, and current transmit and receive activity. I have run a wireless webcam at some events that worked quite well using dialup networking and the quick net connect service, allowing me to connect, upload a webcam image via FTP, and disconnect within 20 seconds. And when you are billed by the second, that means three uploads for one minute of airtime!

Telus Mobility in British Columbia and Alberta allows you to utilize this service by having your computer dial #777 to the phone. The username and password are just QNC. I believe the username is lowercase for Bell Mobility in eastern Canada. There was also someone who managed to acquire a data cable for a phone on the ClearNET PCS network, and with their surf plan the user could also dial #777, and QNC to connect to the Internet from his computer. The interesting thing about this connection, is that it appears to be the same one that the microbrowsers use to connect so quickly.

Sprint PCS in the US also now offers the Quick Net Connect ability. On their network, the dialup number becomes #2932, and the username and password are 'web'

Many new north-american mobile phones are equipped with a microbrowser developed by OpenWave. The current generation of browsers is version 3.1, and relies on an up.link server run by the wireless provider to act as the gateway to pass properly formatted and compressed data to the mobile phone. Many people can not see the need for such a feature, but I am telling you, that is exactly what people were saying about the Internet six years ago. It may be a bit clunky now, but there are some features worth taking a look at.

Tired of paying 95 cents for a single directory assistance listing, where you can only get the phone number? Take a minute to do the search using a 411 search using your minibrowser, and you can get multiple listings, name, address, and phone number. Telus mobility currently charges 15 cents per minute to use this service, so even if you stayed online for 5 minutes to do it, you still come out ahead because you get more information. With practice, you can do it in less than 30 seconds of airtime, costing only 7 cents.

I have used the service to setup links to my server to allow me to stop and start NT services, check the logon times of users, and send & receive e-mail when I won't be near a computer for a while, and need someone to know I'm aware of their issue.

When microbrowser service is setup on your account, you must enter the up.link server IP address your provider has setup. On the StarTACs, you enter IPADDRESS FCN FCN, and you will see Link.A. Press STO, you will see IP Addr 1. Press STO. By default you will see 000.000.000.000. For Telus Mobility in BC, this address is 209.052.079.118.

To easily access sites, you can add them to bookmarks. Then, you can access the corresponding bookmark by holding down the number key associated with it. This allows you to jump straight to say, your e-mail, or favourite information site.

My friend Rog and is working on some content for Microbrowsers. There is now a mobile-playable gateway for Gates Motel!

A related newsgroup posting of mine:

 1 608 ms  398 ms  407 ms 198.229.143.1
 2 409 ms  400 ms  401 ms 198.228.43.2053
 3 404 ms  400 ms  860 ms 204.174.123.121
 4 394 ms  400 ms  400 ms 204.174.123.117
 <snip>
17 394 ms  399 ms  400 ms 209.247.11.14
18 394 ms  400 ms  400 ms 209.244.13.46
19 395 ms  400 ms  399 ms 63.210.199.10
20 421 ms  499 ms  499 ms 209.247.208.45

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Ryan Goolevitch - ryang@trideja.com
Last Modified August 22, 2001