Agile Animal Inc.

Bell’s HSPA+ Covers Almost Everywhere

With the launch of Bell’s HSPA+ network I suspect that there are going to be a bunch on converts from Rogers to Bell. Rogers is only taking care of 5 canadian cites (at the time I wrote this blog) with their HSPA+. Bell pretty much covers everywhere that I have ever been in Canada. And I have travelled coast to coast.

It is hard to argue with a network that offers HSPA+ everywhere.

The only question that remains - what do you do with your Rogers Internet Stick? Bring it with you!

Disclaimer

If you are stopping to read this disclaimer, chances are this is not for you. You might wreck something. You are better off just selling your old stick on Kijiji or Craig’s List.

Unlock the Stick

Unlocking a Internet Stick is actually much more painless than unlocking a phone. I went to [DC Unlocker]:http://www.dc-unlocker.com/ and paid about $15 for 10 unlocking credits. I then had to find a computer running Windows (in my case I grabbed the other laptop and launched VMWare.) All I had to do was run the unlocking software with a Bell SIM card inside the Rogers Stick.

Pro Tip: either buy the SIM card without a plan or borrow a SIM card for this. If for some reason the Unlock fails you don’t want to be signed up to a plan.

Get a SIM Card

This is actually the most painful part. The entirety of the current Bell staff don’t get the whole “just give me then damn SIM card” thing. Usually it takes about 30 minutes by the time they talk to their manager, etc. Likely they will make you sign up for a plan before you leave - like I said, they don’t get SIM cards yet.

I’d suggest going with a 30 day plan. The next time you need a new laptop you can then cancel the plan and SIgn up for a new one at Best Buy - they will give you a $150 discount on a new laptop.

Pro Tip: Don’t sign up for a 3 year contract unless you are getting something worth about $200 for free. That contract is going to cost money if you want to break it and Bell owes you something for signing it. Large companies like Best Buy will make sure that when you sign up for a deal like this you get something sweet for free.

The Settings

Yeah this is the simple part. Once you have an activated SIM you just need to change some settings from my previous article on the Rogers Internet Stick.

Go into System Preferences and then select Network. You will need to change the dialup account created for your Internet Stick.

For Bell, there is no Telephone Number, Account Name or Password. Leave them blank. Then you just need to change the APN in Advanced Settings:

APN: inet.bell.ca

Once this is done clicking connect should be it.

The Punchline

During peak hours things might be a bit slower but I am consistently seeing around 7.0Mbps down and 2.5 MBps up.

Which is pretty amazing if you ask me.

Way to go Bell.

Prelude - Thank You Vancouver 2010

The Vancouver 2010 Games will leave many legacies for Vancouver and Whistler. And while the infrastructure left behind will benefit Canadians, the greatest impact that the Olympics will have is on the state of Wireless Network Access in Canada. To cash in on the ridiculous amount money to be made in roaming from overseas customers, Bell (and Telus) completely refitted their network infrastructure to use HSPA+ (GSM).

The State of the WIreless Nation

With Bell (and Telus) covering most of the Country with HSPA+ and Rogers covering most of the Country with HSDPA (and some select cities - not my city - with HSPA+) things and really amazing. I have posted some speed test results over on my tumblog for Bell, Rogers and Shaw Cable. My wired cable Shaw connection is still fastest on the download but Bell is over twice as fast on uploads. And due to the fact that Rogers has a very small HSPA+ footprint you can expect Bell’s network to be about twice as fast in most places.

The HSPA+ network is faster than standard ADSL. Significantly faster. As in you will notice it is faster. Especially if you are connecting in to a corporate VPN.

Since the HSPA+ launch I have been reading posts from Americans all over the place to the effect of “I am jealous of Canadians and their wireless prowess.”

The Punchline

It is at the point now where I am recommending to my colleagues that they switch to Bell Wireless for their business related internet access. Unless you are downloading movies/super-large files or hosting your own server it provides exceptional value. Since using the service wrong can cost you a lot of money, I am going to explain this in detail: the wireless internet provided by Bell or Rogers will cost you a lot of money if you download movies. Use it for things like email, twitter, posting blog entries and connecting to the corporate VPN.

If you don’t want to have a USB stick hanging out of your laptop at home there is Cradlepoint. You can pick up a wireless router that can use your Bell Wireless Internet as the primary connection for your house. Again, don’t do this if you intend to transfer more than 5GB of data in a month and make sure you are on an appropriate plan (read: torrent users, this is not for you - you thieving b*****ds. Everyone else, make sure you have enough data or select a flex plan.). However, if you are checking email, surfing the web and connecting to the corporate VPN this solution will likely work quite well and be about as expensive as the equivalent wired service.

Why Not Talk About Telus

Simple.

I have been a Telus customer both for wired and wireless telecommunications. Their customer service has historically been so poor that it doesn’t really matter what they offer - I can’t recommend them.

I believe that Bell and Rogers provide far superior customer service. I would describe Rogers as exceptional. And until Rogers upgrades their own network to HSPA+ that is the only thing that is keeping my account with them - their customer service. (Contract fees are pretty negligible when you look at my wireless spending.)

You may or may not have had issues with attempting to Tether your freshly installed iPhone 3.0 OS device to your Apple Laptop.

I did. My MacBook Air did not like Bluetooth tethering one bit.

I am happy to report that this has been addressed with the Bluetooth Firmware Update 2.0.

I should note that the update did not run on my late 2007 17” MacBook Pro - but it did not have any issues tethering to begin with. So if the update doesn’t run on your system you were probably fine to begin with.

Twitpocalypse - when the number of tweets exceeds the largest number you can store in a 32-bit signed integer. In essence twitter runs out of numbers to count peoples tweets.

The Twitpocalypse should have been a non-event. Twitter had things dealt with on their side and warned developers in advanced to update their code - May 13th in fact.

Still several apps broke, including my previous favorite - Twitterific.

Craig Hockenberry and some other iPhone developers don’t know how to test their own code. On his blog he seems to suggest that solution to the problem is that Apple needs to provide a mechanism for allowing a quick path to push a critical update through the App Store.

I am going to suggest something different entirely - it is 100% his fault for not having adequate testing practices in place.

This wasn’t a “brain-fart” or whatever term he wants to call it (and just for the record I hate that term).

This is the sort of thing you toss in your fixtures and unit tests and run every time you commit code. You mock or stub out the pieces you can’t control. Your continuous integration server should test this every time anyone commits some code.

It was a complete failure of his current testing practices.

And Apple can’t fix that with a special track to allow for quick updates.

Just a quick heads up when it comes to comments on the site.

I hate SPAM.

So I pretty much filter all the comments. I try to check once a day and approve anything that is relevant. If your comment doesn’t appear, post it again - sorry I might have deleted it by mistake.

At some point I will upgrade to Engadget-style comments but until then please be patient.

Shaw Cable has started offering DOCSIS 3.0 services to its customers in Saskatoon. (If you read my personal blog you already know this.)

The interesting part (besides the obvious "why Saskatoon" question) is that you practically need to claim to live there to get any sort of details on the service.

So here are the details for you curious folk:

•  100Mbps download
•  5Mbps upload
•  $249.95/month (ouch!)
•  400GB transfer cap

To be completely honest the price does seem a little high. The $199.95 price point would likely have served them better. Once you add phone service and tax you are looking at a $300 bill without cable.

This also makes the "Server Connect Package" a complete joke coming in at $299.95. It was overpriced regardless.

And just to be complete, last month Telus also upped their service speed to 15Mbps by introducing a High Speed Turbo plan for $50.95. Which at first glance looks to be the same as Shaw’s Extreme-I service. Just to be clear though, it is not: for Telus 15Mbps is as fast as possible and the Shaw service sustains 15Mbps with burst at rates up to 25Mbps.

Good news everyone…

Last year Rackspace acquired pretty much every single cloud computing company that I like in one swoop. Included in that list was Slicehost - cloud based virtual private servers.

Today Mosso (another of the acquisitions) turn up their Cloud Server service.

It took me about 5 minutes to get a Cloud Server up and running. Most of that time was spent typing details into their form and then adding the passwords to my vault.

The pricing is the best part. You only pay for what you use. It is really cost effective.

Once I have a chance to push the service a bit and once I get my hands on their developer APIs I will be able to give a better assessment - but I like what I see!

 According to a recent post on Engadget Mobile 91.2% of all iPhone users chew through less than 100MB of data in a month.

Over the course of the last two weeks my "High Speed Extreme-I" connection has degraded to the point where I am getting 1.7Mbps.

I have called in three times now.

During this last attempt the support agent suggested that a house call was in order. It was suggested that the solution to the problem was to "increase the levels" on my modem.

I have really lost patience for Shaw tech support. Consider the following:

• My router is a SonicWALL TZ170 so I can push 30Mbps of data through while encrypted with AES over a VPN. Plugging straight into the cable modem is NOT going to change my speed.
• I have had issues with signal strength before in another location - when this happens you speed tanks all of the time but I am getting a full 10Mbps after midnight (depending on the day).
• I just ran the new diagnostics from Google’s m-labs. It is claiming that my provider is queuing packets and that traffic volume is responsible for the degradation in my network speed.
• Most importantly, adjusting or boosting the "levels" is just wasting my time because it is clear that my node is over subscribed.

I was then told that this useless procedure might take until February 12th because all of their techs are booked. They will try to fit me in earlier because I have a business connection.

Let me rephrase this all in Mark-speak:

My connection has been degraded for over a month because half my neighborhood has discovered bit torrent and you want me to wait a week to send a tech out to my house to fix a problem that I don’t have. 

At this point my Rogers Internet Stick is faster than my Shaw "High Speed Extreme-I" connection. The only thing "Extreme" about my connection is how Extremely slow it is.

Oh, and look at this. It is past midnight an my connection speed is now up from 1.7 Mbps to 6.3Mbps. Everyone must be finishing grabbing their torrents of 24.

Read more about the ongoing saga on my personal bog.

And if you are or you know someone at Shaw, help a guy out…

One of my friends was complaining to me about the fact he needs to charge his iPhone nightly. Apparently his old "WinMo" device would last at least two days.

Like I told him, the first thing to keep in mind is that he uses his iPhone much more than his old HTC - you probably do too. If you use the device more, the battery is going to be consumed much quicker. Also, your old phone was probably an Edge device - Edge consumes much less battery power.

That being said, here are some tips to get at least two days off of a charge:

• If you have an unlimited data plan, turn off WiFi. Doing this by itself doubles the battery life on my iPhone. It is that simple.
• Unless you need it, turn off Push email. Push will keep a persistent connection open which means you are pretty much always moving some data around. That definitely hurts battery life.
• If you are looking for that last little drop, force the phone into "Edge Only" mode by disabling 3G. This tip is useless though if you have WiFi enabled because WiFi consumes so much battery power that you won’t notice the benefits.

Personally, I get about two days with WiFi off and that is good enough for me (I will turn it on but only when I need it and immediately turn it off when I am done). I leave Push and 3G on.