HSDPA as Broadband: The 2nd Report
16 January 2008 in Phones | Comments enabled
I dumped my ADSL subscription last year and switched to using solely HSDPA, or as it’s called in marketing speak: mobile broadband. Serving as my modem is a S60 powered Nokia 6120 Classic (which is not be confused with the older model) which I bought for around 250 € at an online store. I will try to document my experiences and experiments with HSDPA surfing in this series which I’ll call “HSDPA as Broadband” in a semi-weekly monthly fashion.
Reboot, Rinse, Retry, Repeat
I have had some problems with the phone not always connecting to HSDPA or the connection seemingly “dropping out” in use. The solution to my problem is to reboot the phone just before I head out onto the Internet. Hence, I would like to suppose that the problem is most likely due to the phone’s firmware (IE. the software that the phone is made up of) having memory leak issues which causes the connection problems.
This doesn’t, however, prevent any spontaneous self-resets which the phone still likes to do whenever it feels like it. 
For More Speed, Turn Phone Left
A quite interesting thing regarding the inconsistent speeds I was and have been experiencing recently: turning the phone a bit to the left one day seemed to increase the downloads speeds from just 22 kilobytes/second to about 110 kilobytes/second. Now, I don’t have the phone lying down on the table, as this mostly results in it changing from HSDPA to EDGE, but I have it in a penholder which holds the phone vertically and facing the south window in my apartment. This arrangement has been working out fine for the most of the time seeing as the 3G coverage is a bit weaker than it could be where I reside.
Why does turning the phone one way or the other produce better download speeds? My guess is that the 3G cell my phone connects to is a bit to the side of my window and turning the phone to the left a bit more sets the transmitter in more direct line towards that cell. But, really, I can’t say for sure.
Not So Bitten by Bluetooth Right Now
I have finally gotten the phone to connect over Bluetooth, but Nokia has left a big bug in the firmware version that my phone happens to be 
having. The connection works for a minute (quite precisely, even) but after that the Bluetooth stack on the phone freezes up which renders the connection useless. This has been discussed on the various Nokia.com forums and it seems there was an update available, but it got pulled due to unknown reasons.
If you want to connect your 6120 over Bluetooth in Windows Vista, then you need to go and configure the Bluetooth modem in Device Manager. Usually, the 6120 will show up as “Standard modem over Bluetooth” under Modems in the device manager. Pull up the properties on that device, and open the Advanced tab. Enter something like:
+CGDCONT=1,”IP“,”internet.saunalahti”
in “Extra initialization commands” replacing internet.saunalahti with you operator’s respective HSDPA/GPRS access point name.
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