Archived from groups: alt.cellular.fido (More info?)

Does anyone know if there is a "pay as you go" DATA service available? (Fido or not)
I have a Blackberry 5810. It accepts the Fido SIM for phone and SMS but not Data.
Thanks
Kevjin

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.fido (More info?)

Nope, neither Fido nor Rogers offer "open" data for prepaid. The only
thing offered is an extremely crippled WAP (making something mostly
useless completely useless).

On Mon, 11 Apr 2005 08:31:05 -0700, Alex wrote:

> Does anyone know if there is a "pay as you go" DATA service available?
> (Fido or not) I have a Blackberry 5810. It accepts the Fido SIM for phone
> and SMS but not Data. Thanks
> Kevjin

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.fido (More info?)

repatch wrote:
>
> Nope, neither Fido nor Rogers offer "open" data for prepaid. The only
> thing offered is an extremely crippled WAP (making something mostly
> useless completely useless).


Actually, WAP is far from useless. If you drop the fido homepage and
make your own, you can have some very useful stuff. I have a range of
news outlets, including the BBC, directly link to my bank, weather,
cinema listings etc.

In fact, wap can be fastert than the web since you get raw information
without pretty pictures and animated gifs. (I have images turned on for
my wap browser, but you can't access the fido homepage without images
turned on, and they are total morons for having their home page images
only, ezxpecially when each image is a bitmap representation of text !.

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.fido (More info?)

On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 15:19:05 -0400, John Smith wrote:

>> your max download is VERY small (most sites I tried to visit simply
>> wouldn't download),
> This sentence causes me to think you've mixed WAP's problems with
> handsets' problems. Number of handsets (more precisely, but less
> understandable, number of implementations of multitude of WML standards)
> makes it hard, daunting, often non-rewarding to create a site, working on
> every or even high percentage of handsets. For example, the first
> (meaning, even if all other components are perfect) download limit is
> imposed by your handset. Then there is a factor of WAP (it's a protocol,
> remember?), gateway and its connectivity, particular site and its
> connectivity. So, by the time your handset gives up and shows an error,
> there is plenty of room for error (same applies to desktop browsers, by
> the way).

The size is limited by Rogers and Fido on prepaid, it has nothing to do
with the phone. I know this since I've used more then one model of phone,
and even my PDA.

>> it's HORRIBLY slow (which makes the fact you're paying by the minute
>> even worse)
> This particular phrase makes me think you might be (and likely is) wrong,
> because of mix WAP with data link. WAP browsing has not being charged by
> time since Fido discontinued CSD and forced every poor soul to sign up for
> GPRS. If you're using Fido's (now discontinued) or Roger's CSD then I'm
> the first to ask for your settings and how you convince the operator,
> particularly Fido, to add CSD to your account.

GPRS (in WAP form) is charged by the minute on prepaid. Neither Fido nor
Rogers have supported CSD for quite a while.

> Technically, WAP is a protocol to request an object. Underlying delivery
> service is out of its concern (almost). Historically, on mobile handsets
> there were two data links available - CSD and GPRS. CSD is kind of a
> dial-up by modem. GPRS is kind of DSL connection. I have not seen an
> operator, charging for CSD by traffic, they do it by time (regular ISPs'
> way - dial-up is priced per time, not by GB). As well, I've not seen an
> operator, charging GPRS by time, only by traffic (regular ISPs' way - DSL
> is priced per traffic [and speed], connection time is unlimited).

Well you've seen two now, both Fido and Rogers charge prepaid users by the
minute for WAP GPRS access.

> And just
> to add another layer of problems, there is a transport protocol between
> CSD/GPRS and WAP-browser, which for less overhead is connectionless
> without guaranteed delivery (called UDP).
>
> So, having established that you're not charged per minute

It is on prepaid, which is what we're discussing, you're simply wrong.

> , "WAP's speed
> and cost" is a personal, subjective problem. And at this point, I would
> like to clarify that in the previous sentence, I meant "costly, because
> slow" is a wrong argument. But I am whole heartedly agree that price for
> mobile access (GPRS) in Canada is... "Higher, there are only stars". How
> would you like the following (all taxes included): - 4.5 / month plus
> - 0.28 / MB (it is 28 cents per megabyte) - 50KB precision (that's 1 - 50
> kilobytes are rounded to 50 kilobytes)

Fine, I'll give you rough numbers:

Loading wap.yahoo.com on Rogers GPRS prepaid just took 15 seconds.

Loading the ericsson wap home page took a similar amount of time.

I don't know if YOU consider that long, but I do, considering about 5kB of
data (at most) was transfered (most of that being the image), that is SLOW.

>> and they restrict which ports you can use (admitted by them)
> Can't really blame them - everybody wants more money for their service
> (look at STM - they cannot blame oil prices for increased ticket price,
> just because oil prices go up and *down*, but when did you see price drop
> in public transport the last time?)

Sure I can blame them. Non of the European providers I've used prepaid
with had any restrictions, never mind port restrictions.

>> Sorry, but every time I've tried WAP on prepaid, be it Rogers or Fido,
>> it was WAY slower then a real browser, and this is ignoring how
>> ackward the user interface is on most WAP sites.
> Wait a sec. Are you comparing a real browser with handset browser?

Yes, but I've also comparing a "real" browser on a PDA over GPRS WAP with
Rogers to the same PDA accessing web sites over WiFi or dialup. There is
no comparison. When it takes 10+ seconds to display 10 lines of text, that
is SLOW.

WAP is a failure, in every way. I can't wait until it finally dies.

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.fido (More info?)

On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 00:55:41 -0400, JF Mezei wrote:

> repatch wrote:
>> WAP on prepaid is HORRIBLY crippled, aside from the way it's charged,
>> your max download is VERY small
>
> I know that Roger's APNs are terrible. (from what I read, they don't even
> run their own APNs and WAP ghateways). Fido's seem to work well, although
> I have some issues with it (such as lack of an id furnished with HTTP
> headers so that the web server can identify a subscriber (it is a random
> number but firxed for each subscriber).

Can't say about Fido recently, but 1 and a half years ago I tried Fido's
GPRS, it took 3 minutes to send a 15kB MMS... and that's when the network
was actually up... and yes, I tried it with different handsets, with the
same results...

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.fido (More info?)

John Smith wrote:
> wrong, because of mix WAP with data link. WAP browsing has not being
> charged by time since Fido discontinued CSD and forced every poor soul
> to sign up for GPRS.

Actually this is not the case. for prepaid service, Fido charges WAP
access by the minute. From the time you access the first page (when the
handset established the GPRS connection, until you have turned off the
application and your handset tears down the GPRS link after a iddle time
you have set in your handset).

> Technically, WAP is a protocol to request an object. Underlying delivery
> service is out of its concern (almost).

While I am not sure about the stuff between handset and the gateway,
between the gateway and the servers, it is HTTP 1.1 protocol. I serve my
wap pages from the same web server that serves HTML. I just use a
different host name to point to the WML file hiearchy instead of the
HTML file hiearchy.


> So, having established that you're not charged per minute, "WAP's speed
> and cost" is a personal, subjective problem.

When you turn off image loading on your WAP browser, it is quite fast,
unless you are in an area with poor coverage, at which point packets
take longer to be tramsmitted succesfully. (not sure if packet
retransmission incurs data transfer costs though).

Any WAP site that uses images (such as the FIDO home page) is stupid.
WAP is there to give you information. Not pretty pictures. You can save
the image to disk if you want and then disply the image in your file browser.

Personally, about the only use for images I could think of is if I were
able to get current weather radar image for the area I am cycling in so
that I know if I can expect weather in the next few hours. Maps might be
interesting if the handset were able to handle a large image and scroll
through it.

Remember that we're talking about handsets with limited memory. But the
point is that a good WAP site (Fido's excluded) is designed to give you
rapid access to information without bells and whistles. Compare this
witrh web sites designed to load as much images and aimatiosn and ads
and jacvascript code as they can possibly fit.

Consider the Air Canada web site whose home page contains/contained some
740kb of javascript just to ask you for your language.

If you have a 3ghz multiprocessor machine with 10 gigs of RAM, you may
not really feel the slowless of those sites, but use an older computer
and you may find yourself waiting quite a long time for poorly designed
web pages to appear. (since the browsers must constantly re-calculate
layout as new javascript elements are created to change the original HTML).

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.fido (More info?)

Hello everybody,

Today I found at least one cell company that does charge for GPRS by
time - Fido. And yes, it happens only on prepaid. But then, what are we
discussing here? WAP? Slow? Forget it! They, cellular companies in
Canada, are not ready for that. They must get in line with common sense
first.

repatch wrote:
> both Fido and Rogers charge prepaid users by the
> minute for WAP GPRS access.
I could not get the info about Rogers. But when I heard it about Fido
rep, my first reaction was "What a hell he's talking about?". I have to
honestly admit that it was the same reaction as on your message, Repatch.

Ok, I officially withdraw myself from any discussions about Canadian
cellular providers.

>>>and they restrict which ports you can use (admitted by them)
>>Can't really blame them - everybody wants more money for their service
> Sure I can blame them. Non of the European providers I've used prepaid
> with had any restrictions, never mind port restrictions.
Oh, but none of European providers charge for GPRS by time either,
probably, because it does not make sense.

> WAP is a failure, in every way. I can't wait until it finally dies.
I just hope you're not holding your breath until then. I would gladly
agree with you if you replace "WAP" with "Canadian cellular providers".

--
I don't read my e-mail.

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.fido (More info?)

On Wed, 13 Apr 2005 16:42:15 -0400, Matt wrote:

> sure about that ? last month a fido CSR confirmed to me that GPRS was only
> availlable for monthly suscriber, WAP for prepaid, no alternative, i
> recall 2 time to get different staff just to be sure i wasn't getting
> bullshitted and got the same answer. no GPRS on prepaid.

This is another case of marketing going wrong...

When a CSR says "GPRS" they mean wide open GPRS, basically the same as an
ethernet jack to the internet. You can run whatever you want.

When a CSR says "WAP" they mean a severely limited for of GPRS access
where you are only permitted to do "WAP" stuff with the WAP APN. WAP uses
GPRS.

WAP over CSD does exist with other providers, but neither Fido nor Rogers
offer CSD anymore AFAIK. TTYL