Where’s the peanut butter?!

Since quitting my last job I haven’t had many situations where I’ve needed to use connect a laptop to the internet but this morning I got it rolling again and am finding happy results!  The experience still definitely feels slow and I don’t know if I should trust the bandwidth meter results I’m getting from 2wire, but it’s telling me I’m getting about 140kbps.

OK - I’m almost positive this thing’s wrong.  Anyway - the setup is  pretty great.  I think I’ve described before how you can use the T-Mobile $6 T-Zones data plan for unlimited wireless data, but it goes like this:

• Sign up for the plan and get a bluetooth phone and laptop
• Connect your laptop and phone and set up a dialup connection from the PC using the bluetooth connection that dials *99#.  That’s (apparently) the magic code to say “get thee on t-mobile’s data network”
• Now you’ll find you can get on the data network but a lot of functionality doesn’t work.  This is because you’re not paying for the expensive, all access pass to the internet so you need to run some jiggery-pokery to work around those constraints.  You need to do something like the following while you’re at home, then you can go back on the road and use the dialup connection.
  • (Optional) Install privoxy on your home computer and start it running, say over port 8080.
  • Install cygwin on your home computer and configure sshd to work over a port that T-Mobile has not blocked. I use 110, which is the standard port for a mail server.  As long as you aren’t running a mailserver at home, this is fine (and if you are, you just need to run it over a different port)
• Back on the road, install the SwitchProxy addon for Firefox and configure it appropriately to use either an SSH tunnel straight to the net or to talk with your home privoxy install.

And I’m spent.  I’m leaving a few details out so that this isn’t so massively easy that everybody starts using it and T-Mobile decides they need to add constraints blocking my ability to do this, but it works for me.

Hmm - and speakeasy’s speedtest is clocking me at about 170 up and down. It sure feels slower. It’s hard to know whether I can trust this bandwidth meter, though, since my connection to the net right now is my laptop to my phone (over bluetooth) to my home computer (tunneled via SSH and T-Mobile’s WAP gateway) through privoxy to speakeasy and back. It’s almost like I’ve made my own tor, except without all the privacy.