On Thu, 1 Dec 2011, Rohan McLeod <rhn@jeack.com.au> wrote:
James Harper wrote:
Google is giving me conflicting answers... I want to dial a remote gsm device via my iPhone plugged in to a PC but I'm not seeing anything that looks like it might be a modem when I do lsusb. This is obviously different than just having a data connection to the internet as the remove device isn't connected to the internet - I need to dial it directly.
I have a fairly antiquated NextG handset which can function as a mobile 'router'; via a USB cable or WiFi. My understanding is that it is still capable of sending and receiving calls in this situation.
Have you tested that? The last time I tried to use a smart-phone for calls and data the data stopped when the call started. It's really annoying when you have ssh'd to a server and the client calls to ask if it's fixed yet... Apparently you need to either have a phone with two 3G antenna (which is really rare) or a phone that can do calls over GSM while 3G data transfer is in progress. Hardware to support voice over GSM and data over 3G is apparently reasonably common, but software support isn't so good. NB This is generic telephony stuff, I'm not an expert on it and I don't know much about the iPhone.
Are you sure the iPhone can't dial out while connected to the PC ? In which case I can't see why it would care whether the remote device was; gsm ,3g, NextG or 4G.
They apparently want to have a direct data connection between two smart-phones without either being connected to the Internet. I doubt that this will be possible unless they use IP over SMS or something equally horrible.
Even if you are trying to do VOIP over the data channel I would have thought the phone company associated with the service would still hide the complexities of the mobile technology of the remote device from users .......or is there something which I am not understanding ?
Phone companies do a really poor job of hiding the complexities. If you put a different SIM in your phone you have to configure a new APN to connect to the Internet! How hard would it have been to design some way for the SIM to store the APN data - or even for the OS such as Android to have a list of the APNs for all the telcos in the region and the bigger ones in other regions? A file with about 20K of data could have all the APNs that you are ever likely to need and a lot more and that would not be noticed in the gigabytes of storage that modern phones have. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/