Stacking Fault

MacOS X 10.4 + Motorola V330 + T-Mobile = 115kbps

So I was just about to drop T-Mobile as a carrier... Their coverage at my apartment was abysmal, the GPRS service I was getting on my Sony-Ericsson T610 was no better than a 14.4kbps modem, and their "411 and more" directory assistance service seems to be using phone books from 10 years ago.

Then they put a new tower up somewhere around my house and I went from virtually no service to four-bars overnight. Sweet! Data was still pretty poor until someone reminded me that they were deploying EDGE in my neighborhood; I actually hear they've got EDGE in 90% of their network now. Again... sweet.

I've been out of contract for a couple of months so I gave 'em a call to see what I could get out of them. Over the summer I did a lot of traveling and a lot of business-related mobile phone usage, so I was consistently over my plan minutes each month. The first couple of people I talked to at T-Mob told me I "absolutely" had to sign a new contract to change my plan. "Huh?" says I, "I was told about four months ago that I could just call up and change my plan on a month to month basis." Which is, as far as I can remember, what I was told by the service reps earlier this year. "No," I say, "that doesn't sound right. Are you sure? Can I talk to your supervisor? Something's certainly changed in your service offerings if that's the case." The response from the next to the last rep I was talking to was, "NO SIR! YOU CANNOT TALK TO MY SUPERVISOR!" And yes... I'm using caps... this guy was practically yelling at me. Then after about 35 seconds of talking to the guy, he springs this, "I CAN'T CONTINUE THIS CONVERSATION IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO KEEP IT PROFESSIONAL!" and hangs up.

My guess is the service reps are graded on (among other things) how many times a supervisor is called in and how many contract renewals they sell. When this guy realized I wasn't going to renew my contract just because he said I had to and I asked to talk to his supervisor, I'm sure he saw his monthly stats go down, so the best thing to do was to disconnect and take the next call; perhaps someone to whom he could sell a contract renewal to.

I called back and eventually got a guy... uh.. Tyrone I think his name was... Great service rep. I told him what happened and that I just wanted to find out what my options were. He explained that I could certainly get a better plan without renewing, but that if I did renew, I could get a slightly better plan. We chatted about usage patterns and so forth for a little bit, then I told him that I wanted a new phone if I was going to sign a new contract. I told him that EDGE was important to me, and get this... he was able to recommend a phone with just the features I needed. Because I've been a good customer, he threw in a free month's service and I got a slight discount on the phone over the original price quoted.

Tyrone needs a raise.

When I was using my GPRS on the T610 with my Mac, it worked "out of the box." I paired the Mac with the phone, and the Internet Connect app did the rest. Not so with the V330. Alas... it took me a couple hours of surfing and experimenting before I got the solution I was really happy with. Here's a brief note of how I did it..

The first link I found was one on the Photoethnography.Com blog. Yes... it seems odd to me to find detailed technical information of this subject at a site that's supposed to be about photo-journalism, but hey, it's a strange world. The article and the comments led me to Ross Barkman's Home Page. Ross has a collection of Internet Connect scripts on his site that make it quite easy to hook your Mac running 10.4 up to a Motorola V330 via bluetooth. If you want to use GPRS for a 30kbps connection, there's a description of how to do that on the Photoethnography.Com page referenced above.

If you're after a higher connection speed, try this... Note that this works with Macs with Bluetooth interfaces. I've heard mixed reviews about connecting V330's to Macs using USB cables. If you have experience with this... please leave a comment with some notes about how it worked out for you. I'm currently running an iBook G4 with the Cambridge bluetooth radio. I recently used an iBook G3 with a DLink DBT-120 bluetooth adapter. It seemed to work quite well; I got mine at the Apple store for just over $50. YMMV.

Step One First we want to pair the Phone and the Mac. If you've already done this... Great! skip to the next step.

Open the Preferences app. Click on the "bluetooth" item. Click on the Settings tab and make sure that the radio is turned on. Click on the Devices tab and click the "Setup New Device..." button. This should launch the Bluetooth Setup Assistant. I found it to be pretty easy to use so I won't go into a detailed description of how to use it.

About the only difficult part of this process is figuring out how to turn on Bluetooth for the V330 and make it discoverable so you can pair the two devices. Buried in the manual, I found the answer... Click on the menu button on the phone, then go through "Settings" -> "Connection" -> "Bluetooth Link" -> "Setup". You should see a menu with "Find Me", "Power" and "Name" items. My phone came with the Bluetooth radio turned off by default and a name of something like "V330." So I changed the name, set the power to "on", and selected the "Find Me" item to make the phone discoverable for 60 seconds.

Once you've made the phone discoverable by selecting the "Find Me" item, you should be able to complete the Bluetooth Setup Assistant process. At the end of this process, your Mac and your V330 should be paired.

Step Two Go to Ross Barkman's Home Page, search for the text "Scripts for Motorola 3G phones (17kB)". Click on the "Motorola 3G Scripts" link to download an archive containing the connection scripts.

Once you've downloaded and unpacked the contents into the "Motorola 3G May 2004" folder, drag the "Motorola 3G CID1" and "Motorola 3G CID2" scripts into the "/Library/Modem Scripts" directory. There's a ReadMe.txt file in the 3G modem scripts archive that I got, so if things go awry, you can also read that reference...

Launch the Preferences app. If it has been running, restart it. Click on the "Network" item. You should see an overview of your networking hardware.

Create a new location by selecting the "Location" pulldown menu and selecting "New Location..." I named my new location "Mobile - GPRS", "Mobile - 3G" is probably more apropos.

With the newly created "Mobile - 3G" location selected, select the "Bluetooth" item in the "Show" pull-down menu (directly beneath the "Location" pull-down menu.)

Click on the "Bluetooth Modem" tab. This will bring you to a page which should have a "Modem:" pull-down menu. Select the "Motorola 3G CID1" modem. There will likely be a lot of modems listed in this pull-down menu, so look carefully. Fortunately the list is alphabetized, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal. If you don't see the "Motorola 3G CID1" entry, double check that the "Motorola 3G CID1" script was actually copied into the "/Library/Modem Scripts" directory and restart the Preferences application.

But assuming you were able to select the "Motorola 3G CID1" item, click on the "Apply Now" button and get ready to move on to the next step...

Step Three You should now see the dial-up icon on the menu bar. Pull down and select the "Open Internet Connect..." item in the menu. This should (no surprise) launch the Internet Connect application.

Select the "Bluetooth" tab.

Pull down to the "Edit Configurations ..." item in the "Configuration:" pull-down menu. This should bring up the configurations dialog box.

Click on the plus ('+') icon a the bottom of the Configurations list and supply the following values for the fields (do not include double quotes):

Description: "T-Mobile (v330)"
Telephone Number: "internet2.voicestream.com"
Account Name: "guest"
Password: "guest"
Prompt for password after dialing: Unchecked
Modem: "Motorola 3G CID1"
Manual dial to make this connection: Unchecked

Click "Ok"

Step Four Now you're ready to test your configuration. Assuming we did everything correctly, you should see the "Internet Connect" application on the Bluetooth tab and the T-Mobile (v330) configuration selected.

Click on the "Connect" button. Cross your fingers.

If it doesn't work, try using "internet3.voicestream.com" as the telephone number. You might also want to check out what's getting appended to the system.log file. This might provide some interesting information. Open a Terminal window and enter the command: 'sudo tail -f /var/log/system.log'. It will ask for YOUR password and after you supply it, you should see things appended to the system.log. If you know what to do with this info, then great. If you don't, you'll probably want to find someone who knows what to do with it...

You'll probably do yourself a favor by going back to the Photoethnography.Com Blog Entry for Setting up Motorola V330 or T-Mobile PPP Dial-Up-Networking (DUN) and reading some of the comments. If you find something that should be here, please leave a comment or send me an email...

If it does work, check out how fast your connection is by going to the Broadband Reports Speed Test Page. Post a comment here telling us what kind of upload / download rates you're getting along with what city you're in. I'm in the Washington, DC market and I'm getting about 30kbps up and 115kbps down. W00t!

Step Five If you have a blog, write an entry thanking Ross Barkman, NasuKaren, Mobile Mojo and the army of people who commented on the PhotoEthnography.Com blog site. Modesty prevents me from asking you to thank me, but if this HOWTO has been useful, I'd love to know, but keep in mind the heavy lifting was done by Ross and Karen. Also note... Ross Barkman accepts PayPal donations on his site, he asks for enough to buy a pint or two at the local pub. So what would that be? 5 pounds? 10 pounds? Any more than this and Ross has to seriously consider going to a cheaper Pub.

posted by Matthew S. Hamrick @ 7:02 AM