Sharing a HSDPA Connection

My fascination with the CDMA Ev-DO @450MHz has been fading recently. Actually it simply does not work here at the seaside, where I am now... By the way this was the secret selling point - I was hoping for a decent mobile data connection spending my holidays at the seaside. As reported a week ago, the first day I arrived, I found there was no coverage at all. Then I moved to another place by the sea, where signal of three bars looked promising... But unfortunately I was not able to connect and filed a tech support incident with Orange. They promised to reboot the base station... The next morning I tried to set up the CDMA connection again, but the results were no different... Three to five bars of signal and no connection... A few hours later Orange called me just to explain everything was fine, only the network was congested, and the signal meter was just a mock-up... "You may not be able to use the service even if there are five bars... The signal meter reading is irrelevant... There are too many users in your particular area... Try to connect late in the night or early morning...". That just means I should say thank you and cancel the CDMA contracts I signed. Fortunately this has been a "try before buy" offer and I have one month to cancel them... The entire story just spells bad network planning... Hey they have just started marketing this CDMA service and the network is already overloaded? And they will be bringing more and more users on board? Well... this does not seem to be a good long term business plan...

So both my CDMA modems (the ADU-635WA and the ADU-500A) found their way back to their boxes... and I dug out the old faithful Option-225 HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE USB stick. The good thing about the Option-225 is it is not SIM-locked, so I am free to buy whatever prepaid data works in the area. And it seamlessly logged on to the HSDPA network... But as this would not make for any research, I reached to my bag and took out a recently purchased SAPIDO NES 3,5G GR-1100 WiFi router.

The GR-1100 looks almost the same as an Apple Airport device. This is a very nice design, with absolutely no cables, as the entire device is built into a wall power plug. Compared to the Airport, the GR-1100 provides many more options:

• There is a hardware switch changing the operations mode: a router, and access point and an access point client
• There are two USB ports
• There are two wired LAN ports (one can be used as a WAN port when the device works as a router)

But the most interesting is the software inside the GR-1100. Among various things (including Samba and FTP services for sharing USB - attached storage), it allows sharing a USB cellular modem. The Option-225 is among the supported modems. It took me a while to set it up (including firmware upgrade), but eventually it connected to the mobile HSDPA network and spread a small WiFi cloud around. This setup has been working for a few days now, so I presume is stable enough to recommend it. I have been getting download speeds exceeding 2Mbps, with upload trimmed significantly (rarely exceeding 100kbps) and latency in the range of 200ms (twice that of CDMA Ev-DO). Such speeds are comfortable for most Web activities - GMail, Reader, Facebook...


There are other scenarios the GR-1100 may help. Its HSDPA USB port can act as a backup connection for the primary DSL/Cable line, so it may be plugged in between the standard one WAN port home router and a DSL / cable modem. Should the wired link go down, the GR-1100 will automatically switch to wireless backup. It also supports standard firewall / qos rules, together with easy to set up port forwarding for virtual server and virtual DMZ machines, handy for gamers and other P2P users. USB ports can also accommodate a webcam, a feature I have not had a chance to test, but something that may be of interest to some...

With a retail price of around $70, it is a nice piece of equipment - you can use it while traveling either for sharing wired Internet, or mobile via a USB modem. The additional USB port may act as a charging port for your mobile or iPod, or to set up a local shared storage via USB stick. Adding 100$ on top of that for a HSDPA USB modem and $10-$30 a month for a mobile data plan ($10 buys you 2GB, $30 is unlimited), gives a nice package for frequent travelers, who stay within HSDPA coverage and do not roam abroad. Sooner or later HSDPA will be more ubiquitous and roaming data charges will disappear...