Each week I receive an email telling me that the newest copy of a podcast is ready for download and the email provides a link to the MP3 directly. I click on this link, which opens the browser on the N95 and then I'm prompted for an Access Point. I select Rogers Internet as usual, but then nothing happens. The browser sits there with a wait cursor for a minute or two and then it times out.

Okay, so maybe the Rogers Internet Access Point doesn't allow that. I close the browser and I try it again using different Access Points (such as Media, Streaming, and GoRogers), but the same results occur. However, when I used my WiFi as the Access Point, everything works just fine and the file downloads.

I called Rogers about this, but they claim that the 6GB/$30 plan SHOULD BE wide open and there should be no restrictions to what I can access. They recommended I call Nokia.

So, I called Nokia and I explained the situation to them. They swore up and down that their was nothing inherent in the N95 that would do this and that I should get back to Rogers and tell them that.

While I continue to play this "go around in circles" game, I thought I'd mention the problem here in case anyone else has run into this and has found a solution.

This sort of problem seems to occur when I use the Podcast applet too. Once I've updated the RSS feed for a podcast and then click to begin the download of a selected item, the progress indicator stays at 0% until finally it times out and an exclamation point appears next to the name of the file. On ODD OCCASIONS the progress sits at 0% for well over a minute and then it STARTS and the download proceeds as expected. However, this only happened 1 out every 10 to 20 attempts.

I did a bit more research on this and I set up a test on my web server. I put up varying sizes of MP3 files (ranging from 1.17 MB up to 37 MB) and I provided links to download each.

When I clicked on file that was 1.17 MB it took about 2 to 5 seconds to begin. When I clicked on a 5.33 MB file it took from 15 to 50 seconds to begin. When I clicked on a 10 MB file it took from 25 seconds to TOO LONG (I.E. it timed out).

There is a consistent connection between the length of the file and the time it takes to begin. Once it does begin I get some reasonably good download speeds (it took 45 seconds to download the 5.33 MB file on my last test, which works out to approximately 1.2 megabits per second).

Oddly, the amount of time it takes to BEGIN a download is always about 80% to 100% of the time it takes to download the entire file. This is the part I don't get. If this were just a matter of latency, or slow response from a Rogers server, the time it took to begin a transfer should be the same regardless of the size of the file being transferred. It's almost as if the phone has to download the entire file to figure out the size SO THAT IT CAN DOWNLOAD IT.

If anyones wants to try my test downloads you can find them at:

http://www.arcx.com/sites/test.htm

Each file is a crop of the full-length podcast to the size indicated in the link. The final link is the full podcast.

On my 95-3 on AT&T every one of them starts right away.

That possibly implies that it's something in the N95-4, or there's something amiss in my phone. I'm hoping to find out how many other -4s are affected (if any).

Either there something wrong with your access point settings or it's a lockdown on a branded phone.

From time to time my N95-3's data connection gives me trouble; time outs and the like. In this event I terminate the current data connection using the connection manager and then reconnect. This typically resolves said issue.
Hope my shared experience helped you out.

As I noted, the issue isn't one of a simple time-out. The amount of time it takes to open the file is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to the size of the file. This doesn't suggest a mere connection failure, but rather something systemic, either in the phone or at Rogers. I'm hoping to find out which.

I clicked on your 38MB link with my N95-4 and the download started immediately. I regularly download podcasts > 50MB and have never had an issue.

Here's an update to the problem, though I really don't know what happened here:

I decided to try a HARD RESET of the phone, which would of course erase everything in it and return it to its as-bought state. I therefore did a backup of the phone's contents (using Nokia Content Copier) before hand.

Once the phone had restarted I confirmed that all of the previous programs, settings, and data (not including stuff in the mass memory area) had been removed. I then started the browser and I tried to download the 38 MB file. I STILL had the problem, and so clearly hard reset had solved nothing.

I restored the backup from my computer, but I discovered that not ALL of my programs had been put back. I therefore set about replacing the the missing ones.

Along the way I decided to try a download again (just in case miracles did happen) and lo-and-behold the problem had mysterious vanished.

The story could have ended there, but it didn't. The next day I tried it again, but now it DID NOT work. I hadn't installed anything since the last time I'd seen it work successfully, and so I was stumped.

What I did next was to shut down all access points and try again using the Stream access point for the browser. Now it worked again. I haven't done enough tests yet to determine for certain what's going on here, but it seems that if connections to more than one access point are active at one time, the download will behave as I earlier described. I therefore switched all of my applets to use the Stream access point and now everything (including downloads) seem to work.

I'll keep you posted on what I find as perform further experiments.

This is a follow-up to the previous message. I have now conducted enough experiments to be reasonably sure that if there are connections open to 2 or more different Access Points, a download will behave as I outline at the beginning of this thread. If you ensure that only 1 Access Point is used (either Rogers Internet, Streaming, Media, GoRogers, or a WiFi connection) then everything works well.

This is clearly an odd limitation of the S60 firmware, and one that they should perhaps warn you about (or better yet, fix).

I just tried your download link over 3G while I had multiple other apps connected via Wi-Fi. The download started immediately.