Recently I bought a Sony Ericsson w810i mobile. Till then I was using Nokia 1100. I never felt to go for a high end model. Recently Airtel introduced Mobile Office scheme and I thought of utilising this feature.

Airtel Mobile Office provide various schemes under this name. I choose 30 days unlimited internet access for Rs. 375/-. This is in Chennai and I don’t know about the price in other cities. I think it is much cheaper in Kerala. One wonderful thing about this scheme is that roaming is free of charge. While roaming you can access unlimited internet without paying any roaming charges. I had wonderful experience in Cochin. It is best to use this scheme in Airtel EDGE enabled networks. To utilise this technology an EDGE enabled mobile phone is necessary. That is why I choose Sony Ericsson w810i.

I bought w810i for Rs. 14400/-. I thought it was worth spending that much because of the cool features it has other than normal mobile features.

• Music only mode allows you to use your device as music player.
• Wonderful music player which plays almost all formats.
• Built-in FM radio. Earphone should be plugged in inorder to use this feature.
• 512 MB memory stick that comes with the mobile is enough to store some of your recent hits and some games and cool applications.
• Lots of Java applications can run on this mobile.
• EDGE enabled for high speed data transfer.
• Bluetooth
• Infra-red.
• Plenty of cool applications
• Light weighted.

What else can you ask from a small mobile phone?

I haven’t used any other high end mobile phones. So I can’t make a comparison here. Altogether I am satisfied with the performance and features of this mobile.

Coming back to Airtel Mobile Office, I had some initial issues getting connected to the internet. There is a Rs. 375/- recharge especially for Mobile Office. Once this is done, customer will receive a confirmation message from Airtel within 24 hours saying that the connection got activated. Followed by setting will be sent which is to be installed. Now you have to restart the phone to start using GPRS connection. I was not aware of this restart thing and hence I was not able to connect initially. I had to take the phone to nearby Airtel center where they fixed the issue by just restarting the mobile.

After getting this issues fixed, I was on internet always. Even I can connect this mobile phone to my laptop and browse from it. That is another article. I installed some cool Java applications that helps me to keep connected to the internet.

• Opera Mini – Wonderful browser. I wonder how could they put everything in KBs.
• GoTalkMobile – For instant messaging – Google Talk.
• EQO Mobile – For instant messaging – Supports multiple protocol – Yahoo, Gtalk, etc.
• jmIrc – Cool irc client.
• MidpSSH – Another wonderful telnet/ssh client. I couldn’t believe when I remotely logged into grex.org.
• flurry – To send photos as e-mail.

Most of these applications are available from http://getjar.com.

Life is much better!

I assume that you have subscribed to Airtel Mobile Office and you are able to browse internet using phone.

You need cdc_acm module in order to make your phone act as a modem. I hope you have this compiled as a module. Just plugin the USB cable into your computers USB port and use the command dmesg to see the following messages at the bottom.

usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
cdc_acm 2-2:1.1: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
cdc_acm 2-2:1.3: ttyACM1: USB ACM device
usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
drivers/usb/class/cdc-acm.c: v0.25:USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters

If you see something similar, that means your device has been detected as a modem. You can access this device using the file /dev/ttyACM0. You can even use minicom or other communication programs to use this device as a modem.

Also you need ppp to connect to the internet. Install ppp daemon for your distribution. Debian users can just do the following to install ppp.

sudo apt-get install ppp

This will install both pppd and chat programs. I won’t get into much detail about these commands here.

Steps
1. Create a file /etc/ppp/peers/w810i with the following contents.

/dev/ttyACM0
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/peers/chat-w810i'
debug
crtscts
noipdefault
ipcp-accept-local
defaultroute
novj
nobsdcomp
novjccomp
nopcomp
noaccomp
usepeerdns
noauth

2. Now create another file /etc/ppp/peers/chat-w810i with the following contents.

ECHO ON
''          'AT'
'OK\r'      'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com","0.0.0.0",0,0'
'OK\r'      'ATD*99***1#'
'CONNECT'

Now you are ready to connect to the internet. Just type in the following command.

sudo pppd call w810i

You must be sudoer for the sudo command to work. It will ask for your password. If you don’t use sudo then you can log in as root and run the same command without sudo in the beginning. Now you will see a message “Connecting” on your mobile phone. If you look at the file /var/log/messages at the bottom you can see something similar to below lines, this means you are connected to the internet.

Jul 30 20:22:18 xxxxxx pppd[4652]: Serial connection established.
Jul 30 20:22:18 xxxxxx pppd[4652]: Using interface ppp0
Jul 30 20:22:18 xxxxxx pppd[4652]: Connect: ppp0  /dev/ttyACM0
Jul 30 20:22:19 xxxxxx pppd[4652]: Remote message: Congratulations!
Jul 30 20:22:19 xxxxxx pppd[4652]: PAP authentication succeeded
Jul 30 20:22:19 xxxxxx kernel: PPP Deflate Compression module registered
Jul 30 20:22:20 xxxxxx pppd[4652]: local  IP address 117.97.49.57
Jul 30 20:22:20 xxxxxx pppd[4652]: remote IP address 61.95.248.66
Jul 30 20:22:20 xxxxxx pppd[4652]: primary   DNS address 202.56.250.5
Jul 30 20:22:20 xxxxxx pppd[4652]: secondary DNS address 202.56.250.6

Open your favourite browser, mine is firefox, and have fun.