The Downward Spiral

My Experience with Voicestream and Nokia 8390

I wasn’t about to spend $20/month for less than 56Kbit for occasional use from my carrier Voicestream. I’ve really been happy with Voicestream up until this year. They have not brought out any more phones from Nokia.. specifically the Nokia 8390. I just bought an unlocked version of the phone and popped in my SIM card. Worked like a dream. This is truely a great phone. Their customer service is very hush hush about what they don’t offer… however I’ve been very happy with their attentive, curtious, and helpful staff when they can tell me about what they do currently support.

But what about this WAP stuff? Would it work with my Nokia 8390? I had to figure that out myself because Voicestream isn’t talking. And as I mentioned before, even if they DID support it, I wasn’t going to pay for it… it’s too much for too little.

Two days ago I knew almost nothing about it and really still don’t… but I have enough experience with this type of stuff to carry me through.

It turns out that these phones don’t really access the web directly. Instead they go through what is known as a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) gateway which is a regular computer that translates HTTP in to this WAP stuff. The types of documents it reads are not HTML, but WML which is a markup language based on XML (I need to learn that next).

So, a wireless phone needs two things… an internet connection and a WAP Gateway. Well, since I work for an ISP, I have more than a few ways to connect to a dialup or ISDN. No problem there. Enter the WAP Gateway. THAT is really what Voicestream has… access to their gateway.

Turns out, that the gateway is really just a piece of software. I found one called Kannel: Open Source WAP and SMS gateway. Runs on Linux. Is OpenSource. Devlopment is still current. Lovely piece of software!

After a couple hours of messing with it, it works.

My settings are thus:

• Home page: http://wap.yahoo.com/ (or any other WML page)
• Connection type: Permanent
• Connection security: Off
• Bearer: GSM Data
• Dial-up number: (my dialup line)
• IP address: (IP number of the host running bearer box)
• Authentication type: Normal
• Data call type: ISDN (analog works too depending on your line)
• Data call speed: 9600
• Login type: Automatic
• User name: (username for my dialup line)
• Password: (password for my dialup line)

I have a cable connetion at home with a semistatic IP address and so I just use that Linux box to run Kannel. That is the IP address mentioned above.

I can access WML sites just fine using my cell phone without paying for any more than just minutes, which I have 3000/month of right now. Pretty cool! Speed is fine because WML is very short anyway. And besides, working on a tiny little screen you don’t want anything else besides text… although graphics are possible.

Some Notes:

• When connected to the WAP gateway my cell phone really does have an IP
  address. However, that IP address is unpingable and when portscanned reveals
  nothing. That’s pretty cool… maybe not from a support standpoint but
  from a privacy one.
• The gateway, however, can see the request in plain text so trust your
  gateway! Although, I believe, that SSL is supported on sites that have SSL.
  Haven’t tested that though.
• “Connection Security” set to yes didn’t work.

My Nokia can send email all by itself on Voicestream. My email address right now is nmossie@tmomail.net and I have a bunch of aliases for that of course @initiated.com. The thing I didn’t know until just now, sending email. You type your message with the email address to send to first and then in “Email Server” you put the number “500″. That’s it. Message sent.

… but that costs money because it uses their SMSC (Short Message Service Center) gateway. That’s bad. I don’t like paying, even though it’s only like $0.10 a time. But seriously, why does this cost money? Probably just to justify the equipment it’s running on. Well I’ve already paid for my computer and Internet connection, so why pay even more? So I use a web based sendmail client. It let’s me send from my REAL email address. Now this is of course a big security hole in your server as it basically allows it to become an open relay from the web. Well, just be sure to lock it down using your webserver so that only you are using it. Don’t skimp on this. It’s important! This program is called @1 WAP Sendmail by UPOINT and it’s just a Perl script with an accompanying WML page.

Also, I found a way to check my REAL email using my WAP phone. This is a PHP3 program (needs some minor adjusting to run on PHP4). It is called WAP Mail v1.30. This is a free one that allows reading (only) from an IMAP server. Replying, deleting, and all that are not in there. However, I really like minimalistic stuff like that that has basic functionality than I can improve on. Plus, it’s legal to do that because it’s under the GNU Public license. This is probably not the best available client though since it hasn’t been updated since September 15, 2000. There are TONS of these WAPMail programs around… you’d probably do well to check out something else if you don’t want to fuss with modifying it yourself. That being said, I’ve added these functionalities to this program:

• Functionality with PHP4
• It loads your INBOX for those with multiple boxes. I might make this
  settable at some point.
• Took out the welcome screen with the picture and how many emails are in your box.
• A “More…” button so that you can scroll through your whole inbox. Before
  you could only view the first X messages in your mailbox. That is set in
  the constants file.
• I took out the date line in the message index display.
• The message index display displays the index: sender
• The aforementioned line and the subject line are truncated to a specific
  number of characters set in the constants file.
• One can specify their username and password inside the
  constants file for more password security. Just be sure to protect that file!

But anyway… having access to the WML web and my REAL email system for no more than the cost of what I already have (home computer, home internet, and work internet) is worth it to me.

Other utilities that I’ve seen that I’ll probably be checking out… unix shells from the WML web: adminstrate from ANYWHERE. Portscanners and system statictics. A big one: HTML2WML on the fly converters. There’s a Perl one for that.

A big question though I have though is about GPRS (General Packet Relay Service). Can I get that to work? I have no idea. I’d still need my WAP gateway I’m sure. I’ve found some hints around online, like setting my access point to use internet2.voicestream.com but that didn’t make it go. It still wanted to know a username and password. I’m no really sure what that would be connecting to… Voicestream I guess. I’m guessing its sorta like PPPoE.

So in order to use GPRS, so called T-Zone stuff, I think I need to pay for that. Right now they have 1 MB (w00t) with a $10/MB overage and 300 two way messages on the GRPS network for $2.99/month. The next jump is $19.99. I’m wondering if they catch your data coming out of the phone over their network or at the WAP gateway… if it’s at the WAP gateway… heheh. I doubt I’ll get it but I may have to just to see it. I dunno.

Another development… I tried Analog, Auto Speed Select, and dialed up our free phone lines. I got a 33.6Kbit connection from my phone as reported by the dialup box. It was pretty sweet. So really, I’m not sure how fast that “ISDN” connection was going anyway. This is much cheaper too as it costs me nor my company anything.. extra.. that and my boss got on me for using that other system even though I was using an account that he uses :).

Ringtones and all sorts of SMS can be done using Gammu (formerly Mygnokii2) for Linux. I’ve used 0.71 with the following ~/.gammurc file:


[gammu]
port = /dev/ircomm0
connection = at115200

You have to send ringtone’s back to yourself though and not just save them on the phone. How to do that is all apparent in the examples… it’s just having to do that is not clear. The author of this is very responsive. If you have problems, email him and he’ll get back to you in a couple days. A very good program to use with the phone. In the next version, 0.72, he said he’ll get native 8390 working so you can also contacts and stuff. IrDA must be working (ie you can see the Nokia 8390 in “irdadump”) to get this to work
right.

Ringtones themselves are .rtttl files. They can be converted (back and forth) from .mid files with Ringtone Tools, but really it’s just better to look for (or make.. it’s easy) .rtttl files since the Nokia 8390 doesn’t have a super duper MIDI synth (ie not polyphonic). Send the .rtttl file with gammu as an SMS message back to your phone, through the phone, to get ringtones on the phone.

Text and and contacts (.vcf’s … VCARDs) are very easy… just use mygnokii2 to save stuff to the phone… no need to bounce those back. You can also save ringtones this way, but you have to SMS them to yourself (or someone else) to get them to save in the phone.

This is how websites sell ringtones apparently… they just have rtttl’s that they SMS to people. hell… at $2-$3 a pop, why not?