Update: Michael Geist with some info from Day 1 of the net neutrality hearings:

It was the consumer presentation that did the most to link network management to the law and it also highlighted reason for great concern. I think that the consumer groups rightly focused on who should bear the burden of demonstrating that DPI and other Internet traffic controls are consistent with current Canadian law. The groups argued that these are prima facie violations of Section 36 of the Telecommunications Act and that the onus therefore should fall on the carriers to show that there is a serious problem, the solution minimally impairs users’ rights, and is proportional to the harm.

Unfortunately, the questions that followed suggest that the CRTC Commissioners start these hearings having accepted the carriers’ claims that congestion is a problem and that inhibiting the use of deep packet inspection could result in increased consumer costs for Internet access. This suggests that there is a steep mountain to climb in these hearings, leading me to believe that the issue will ultimately be a political one with pressure on the Conservatives to join with the Liberals and NDP in supporting net neutrality.

Too bad, really. Congestion was never a problem for me, not on DSL, anyway. Now I my p2p crawls during peak times… maybe I should set up MLPPP… TekSavvy supports it, and apparently it bypasses throttling…

Possibly related posts:

1. Liberals support Net Neutrality
2. Short video presentation on Net Neutrality
3. More submissions to the CRTC

The first thing I did when I powered it up is cringe at all the AT&T bloatware installed on the thing… luckily there is a whole community of people who hack PocketPCs and Mobile Phones, so you get the functionality you want out of the device. They have a wiki page here.

It’s actually really easy to do. Once you have ActiveSync set up, you install the HTC Kaiser Hard-SPL to enable custom ROM flashing. [Local mirror: Kaiser Hard SPL]. Then you can choose from any number of ROMs posted in the upgrades forum. I chose XDA-Live – but I’m thinking about trying out Alex’s Multimedia ROM

Dutty has ROMs and cab files with add-on programs hosted here.

Then, I just had to set up the Rogers EDGE stuff:
APN: internet.com
user: wapuser1
password: wap

And for MMS:
APN: media.com
user: media
pw: mda01

And away it went! (Oh, and I had to disable the AT&T proxy).

I had a bit of an issue using it as a modem for my laptop, like I was using my old Rogers phone. There’s an HTC tool to put the phone into modem mode, located Start -> Settings -> Connections -> Wireless Modem, but you need a driver for the computer to recognize it.

Some poking around found instructions here (which had the drivers – USB Modem Drivers) and here, although I kept getting errors when I followed it. I noticed that whenever I actually ‘dialled’ from the laptop, the HTC Modem Link software would crash / quit from my HTC touch.

As a comment from the second link above stated, I had to remove the AT command to ‘initialize’ the HTC modem — that seemed to be crashing it.

• Start Menu > Control Panel > Phone and Modem Options
• Under Modems Tab, Select HTC USB Modem and Press Properties button
• Go to the Advanced Tab
• Clear the Extra Initializations Commands
• Click Ok

That worked like a charm!

I also managed to get it to work via Bluetooth, by using the Internet Sharing program installed with my ROM and the Network Access Point Bluetooth profile.

*phew*… I think I’m done playing with the phone for a while!

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1. iPhone Fully Loaded: A great gift for someone with an iPhone
2. Always get receipts
3. New Toys

Since my roommates were staying for about a month longer than I was, and all the utilities (like Rogers) were in my name, I cancelled the account a month after I left. And entrusted the return of the equipment to one of my roommates. Now, generally this is a bad idea, but I’m a pretty nice guy — therefore didn’t want to screw my roomies over for signing up for ONE MONTH of service only — and this particular roommate was quite trustworthy, all things considered. Nevertheless, other people are never going to look out for your interests as well as you yourself, and after a series of plausible events, my roommate ended up returning said modem to a Rogers store that doesn’t usually take them.

Lo and behold, a few weeks later, I get a bill from Rogers asking for a pile of money for unreturned equipment. After a few phone calls to Rogers and e-mails to my roommate, they assure me that everything is probably fine, it’s just taking a while to go through their system. I get busy with work, and forget about the whole thing — until I get a nasty note from a collection agency that I’d better pay up or my credit rating will go down the toilet.

*sigh*. A few hours of calls later Rogers puts a trace on the modem and they say “oh look! It’s been in our warehouse for a while now…”. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Anyway, if I’d had a receipt for this I could’ve just sent that thing in and told them to go shove their bill where the sun don’t shine, but I didn’t, so I couldn’t.

Now, before that hard lesson really hit me, I decided to cancel my Cogeco Internet account as well. They had promised an unblocked, unfiltered account and lo and behold my BitTorrent speeds were maxing out at 3k/sec; and increasing to full speed if I tunneled through a VPN. Smells like traffic shaping to me. Cogeco tech support initially gave me the runaround and finally said that they had made a corporate decision not to address BitTorrent complaints because they “don’t support BitTorrent”. Dude, that’s like the phone company saying they don’t support French phone calls when I call to complain that I’m getting terrible reception if I start speaking in French. I don’t want you to support it, I want you to stop interfering with it!

Anyway, I still have to write that particular letter to their president, but to make a long story short I just told them to cancel my account. No problem, they said, we’ll send a guy over tomorrow to disconnect it. I’m of course at work all day — but my gorgeous fiancee was home. The cable guy came, picked up the modem, and when asked for a receipt said that wasn’t necessary. Here’s where delegating hurts again — no insistence was made.

Unsurprisingly, I received a bill for unreturned equipment a few weeks later. Never mind that they have records of the guy coming out to disconnect my cable internet. WTF was the guy doing here if he didn’t pick up the modem? Seriously?

So now it’s back to the ‘we’ll try and track the modem in our warehouse’ thing… *sigh*. If they say they can’t find it, well, that’s a big mess to wade out of. I can always threaten to cancel my Cable TV supscription as well…

Lessons to learn:

• If you want it done right, do it yourself.

• Always, always, always get a transaction in paper. Contracts, exchanges of goods or property, whatever. Get it written down. Otherwise, you’re screwed.

Possibly related posts:

1. New Toys
2. Internet is being slow
3. Quickie

I have a pretty sweet corporate plan as a health professional. They always get you with that $7 monthly network access charge (pay as you go is better for avoiding that, albeit at a significantly higher per minute rate. Still worth it if you only make a few calls a month).

What’s really cool about it is the wireless internet. I can check my e-mail, browse the web, etc. from my phone. Now I know the tiny screen is not that nice for doing this — but the best part is I can use my phone as a modem for my palm or even my laptop! Internet anywhere I am… now that is a sweet deal.

Yeah it’s $5 for 2MB and and extra 3 cents per kilobyte… which is extortion… but it’s still really convenient.

It took a little doing to get working with my laptop though. The ‘Network Access Point’ thingie doesn’t work — I had to use the ‘Dial-Up’ mode, and log in with a secret username and password they don’t publish anywhere — wapuser1 / wap — and some code *99***n# (where n is the number of your data service listed under ‘Menu -> Settings -> Communications -> Data Comm. -> Data Accounts -> Rogers Internet -> More Info). Thanks to this post for helping me figure this out!

In other internet news, I got a 3 MBit DSL account here. It’s soooo nice for torrents and p2p — now that I have it I feel more secure in writing a nasty letter to Cogeco. I have a 7MBit account with them but torrents are throttled into uselessness so for that purpose I might as well not have it. Such a pain…

Anyway, this long weekend I might actually have time to set up my web server… ! Hope everyone has a great labour day weekend!

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A note about traffic shaping — I really don’t mind if Rogers implements some QoS on their networks. I always limit the upload bandwidth in my client to a reasonable rate, as I do NOT want my web surfing to suffer due to BT or other P2P apps. Similarly, I do want my neighbours who may be running BT or other P2P software at full, unlimited bandwidth, to have lower priority than my VoIP / web / e-mail / etc.

But throttling all BT traffic to 0.5 k/ sec upstream? Give me a break, that makes the whole protocol useless. I’m paying for these pipes. I’d happily pay more for fatter pipes. If you want to start charging for bandwidth used, by all means go ahead. But if you’re marketing your product as a high-speed connection, don’t cut the speed on the most popular things those connections are used for.

Possibly related posts:

1. Rogers and BitTorrents
2. Rogers Newsgroups
3. Installing Azureus on my server

It is Rogers since if I VPN to the University, my Bittorrent bandwidth is instantly what I’m used to. Since I don’t really want to be hogging U of T’s bandwidth… I switched back to old school, newsgroups. Usenet search engines helped with that transition, so I don’t have to d/l gigs of headers.

And now… the latest crushing blow — Rogers is, as of Dec. 15th, discontinuing their newsgroup service. Thanks for telling me, Rogers — I would never have known had I not stumbled across it in a forum somewhere. *sigh*

So, it’s back to the drawing board. Apparently BitComet has a ‘packet header encryption’ feature that thwarts Rogers traffic shaping. So I may be back on BT after all… or I’ll just ‘borrow’ U of T bandwidth via VPN…

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3. Always get receipts

Oh well, all the more reason to use BitTorrent…

Possibly related posts:

1. Rogers and BitTorrents
2. New Azureus version with Encryption/Obfuscation
3. Always get receipts

Tomorrow I’m going to plug my laptop straight into the modem and see if that’s the problem. We also moved the modem to a different cable outlet, so I’ll plug it back into the original one to see if that makes a difference.

After that… it’s time to bitch at Rogers. I’m not paying nearly $100 / month for a shitty connection, and this has been going on for a couple months now.

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