funk~station

In Germany the prices for mobile phone connections keep on dropping and finally reached the point where providers offer free phone calls to national landlines phones.

Assuming that you have

• a broadband internet connection at home
• a normal phone line at home
• a notebook
• and a mobile phone that can serve as a modem for your notebook
• (and of course a little geek inside you that tells you not to stop working until technology makes living easier)

you can now connect to the internet for free everywhere where you can make a mobile phone call.

You need two additional things:

• A flat rate for your mobile phone (in Germany this'll cost you 25€/month and 25€ fee for subscribing to the service)
• and an old i486 computer, that has a modem (yes, the one you thought you'd never use again), a network card and a floppy disk drive.

This blog entry gives you a short introduction on how to set up your system.

Set up your notebook

I did this with my Powerbook, but I'm 100% sure that using Windows XP or any Linux this will work as well. The cell phone in this example is a SonyEricsson P800; again, any other celly with bluetooth will do the job.

First thing is to set up your dial-up connection. Start at the System Preferences. Enter the bluetooth setup and enable your phone to serve as a modem.

Edit your network settings to use your mobile connection to call your server at home.

Set up your cell phone

Switch on bluetooth

And configure your phone to serve as a modem. This might not be necessary for other phones.

Test your setup

Go back to your network settings and use the dial-in button. After the connection to your cell phone is established your phone at home should be ringing. (Don't answer the call, you'll just hear some strange noise, ok?)

Install a server that routes your data calls

At the moment I don't have a PC that could handle the calls. I'll make some testing myself as soon as I get a floppy drive for the PC notebook.
For now, you'll have to trust Carla Schroder and her article Building a Linux Dial-up Server.
Among others, she suggests to use Freesco, which is open source and which seems to be a stable system that can be installed quickly.

Conclusion and things to do

For the price of 25€ a month and 1-3 hours of setting up the system you'll have an internet connection available everywhere you go. In addition you can use this connection to access all systems (e.g. file servers) that are hooked up to your network at home.

The setup discussed still needs to be tested with programs like Skype (just imagine you could use Skype for an entire train ride through Germany!), video streaming solutions and so on.

If you have any additional ideas on that topic or if you find an easier or a cheaper solution to achieve the same thing feel free to post your comment. Questions are also welcome, of course.

(For the P800 screenshots I used Peter van Sebille's SCap, all images were quickly processed with Scott Moschella's GIMPshop.)