Data Tethering While Roaming...2nd

[hman414]

Sorry for the double post... Browser would not let me delete or edit...

I signed up for the $49.99/month unlimited everything (5 Gb "high speed" data) small business plan to try it out.

I have been with cingular/at&t for 15+ years and was looking for something more affordable. I also wanted to stay GSM because I do a fair amount of int travel.

Based in the Milwaukee, WI area I drove up to Green Bay, WI to meet a client and do some T-Mobile testing.

Up in Green Bay I was roaming on Einstein PCS (now AirFire). I am using an unlocked Motorola Razr2 V9X. Since the agreements of the merger breakup were announced I would think I would be roaming on at&t 3G in Green Bay (UMTS 1900) but that was not the case. I was roaming on AirFire (GSM/Edge 1900).

Tried the wap browser and POP3 email client on my V9X. Worked fine though a bit slow (to be expected on Edge).

Next I tried to tether via Bluetooth. I had tried tethering via Bluetooth in Milwaukee (on the T-Mobile home GSM/Edge 1900 network) and it worked fine.

In Green Bay tethering was a different story. I connected to the Internet fine. I was able to ping sites like google.com, yahoo.com etc. just fine. When I opened up IE I got a T-Mobile message saying "Sorry, T-Mobile Broadband-including Phone Tethering & WiFi Sharing - is not available while roaming."

My question is how does T-Mobile know I'm tethering? I have been tethering on at&t's $20/month "MediaWorks" package for 15 years with no problems what so ever on or off the at&t network.

Since I am able to ping web sites I was certainly connected to the Internet via tethering while roaming. With this being the case is there a way around this T-Mobile tethering while roaming error web screen?

Any info would be great!


Thanks!

[jet1000]

When they've blocked it before, they've detected a pc browser. People using Firefox have used the User Agent Switcher plug in to disguise the pc browser as a mobile browser such as android. Tmobile will think you're on a mobile device and they'll let the traffic go through. Also streaming software on your pc will also likely still work with no block.

[ziddey]

perhaps a vpn or other tunnel (ssh socks). then again, edge is hardly suitable for maintaining a vpn

[Wireless Junkie]

I highly doubt you were tethering on AT&T Mediaworks in 1997..

[hman414]

Thanks for all the great tips... I will give them a try.

I do stand corrected. It was not MediaWorks in 1997, it was circuit switched data 9.6k...


Henry

[Kies]

If you want to save some money, you can sign up for an AT&T iPad plan and use it while roaming.

[brad15]

you just need to change your user agent string in Firefox to the same as a phone web browser, just type "about:" in the address field and use "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7" as your useragent and it will work while roaming.