Wednesday, November 11, 2009

We Have Internet At Home (sort of)!

I am writing this on my Mac in my home in Dhahran. So clearly I do have internet connectivity. Sort of.

Why sort of? It's complicated. As I mentioned in the previous post, Aramco IT told me 13 weeks before DSL here in the house (and that's just an estimate--but there's a holiday coming up and after that I plan to be a squeaky wheel).

I don't want to live without internet for 13 weeks. So I asked around and found out that the two main phone companies out here, Mobily (mo-BY-lee) and STC (Saudi Telecom), also provide wireless internet. There are people on camp that use both to connect to the internet from home. I decided to test this to see if it would work for me either as a stopgap until DSL or perhaps permanently. I borrowed a fancy USB modem from a friend. Then today I went to the Mobily outlet in the Al Muneirah commissary and bought a SIM card and pre-paid plan with unlimited internet access for SR 300 per month (about USD 80-90).

I put the SIM card into the modem and plugged that into the Mac--only to find, whoops, the modem/SIM/provider/some mysterious special code is not recognized by Apple.

Hmm. What to do.

Then I remembered my SPIFFY NEW cell phone. I splurged earlier this week and bought a very nice Nokia E71 3G phone (silver, in case you were curious). All cell phones out here are multiband and unlocked. And all cell plans here in KSA, and in fact, the rest of the world, just like internet plans, are prepaid/pay as you go affairs. Only in the U.S. do you find the stupid locked phones and contracts and such expensive post-paid plans. I had been using my new phone only as a phone with a very cheap SIM card that supports phone calls, no internet.

Anyway, using Apple's built in WLAN software, I took a look around and found a neighbor who had an unsecured network. So I hopped onto his network (called Mohammed at Mango--the street we live on is Mango Circle) and did a bit of research. Turns out I can use my 3G phone as a wireless modem for my iMac. And hey, look, I have this brand new unlimited internet access SIM card that will just .... slip right into that new phone. Of course my cell phone number is different now since each chip has its own number (966-054-6013310, in case you are interested--please don't call unless you know what time it is in GMT +3!).

It took me almost 2 hours to bail on the USB modem, research the wireless modem option, set up the phone for the internet, test it, then get the Bluetooth settings on the Mac set correctly, test that, then...handshake and connection!

So, you see, complicated.

My connection is a bit slow but I think that is because it is the weekend here and 8:30pm and local 'net usage is bound to be really high. I won't even try to put pics in the blog right now.

Still, I am utterly amazed at several aspects to all of this. First, I'm using my PHONE as a wireless modem to connect my COMPUTER to the internet--and they aren't even connected to each other! The technology that went into creating that kind of thing is crazy sophisticated. And second, I actually managed to do all of this myself! Well, okay, I did make a call to Mobily tech support but they got my phone connecting to the internet in about 5 minutes.

And the good news is that I hope to be able to get some pictures up this weekend (remember, that's Thursday and Friday for us). Stay tuned.

1 comment:

FiberGeek said...

Sounds like things are moving along.

Necessity is the mother of Invention! Congratulations on getting something working.