Blackberry as Modem: using a good Dialup Accelerator (make EDGE feel like EVDO/HSDPA)

[Mark Rejhon]

Hey all,

As I am now regularly tethering my BlackBerry as a modem for laptop (I finally bit the dust and got the Rogers 200 megabyte plan -- we are not as lucky as you T-Mobile users), I wanted a way to keep my data down.

I am a customer but wanted to give kudos to Propel (dialup accelerator). It really works very well - It feels very similiar to having a 3G Sierra Aircard plugged into my laptop.

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Propel Accelerator Performance Meter

Text Original: 2.2 MB
Text Compressed: 395 KB
Text Savings: 83%

Graphics Original: 1.4 MB
Graphics Compressed: 229 KB
Graphics Savings: 84%

Total Original: 3.6 MB
Total Compressed: 624 KB
Total Savings: 83%
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It looks like webpages look like they download approximately one quarter the amount of time on my EDGE connection. (making my EDGE connection feel like a 700 kilobit 3G connection instead of a 150-200 kilobit EDGE connection) Webpages are faster/smaller and nicer looking (with graphics) than if I configure my web browser (without Propel accelerator) to disable loading images initially. As long as I don't download too much Flash animations or file attachments, I no longer have to really watch my data usage when simply doing web browsing. I may actually not have needed to go to the 100 dollar data plan, as it looks like it may be safe to use occasional tethering on a 25MB data plan (as long as you temporarily disable your antivirus/windows automatic updates -- that uses lots of data).
This software would appear to also help 3G users to get even faster speeds (maybe it feel like a 6 Mbps Cable Internet connection)

[Mark Rejhon]

Forgot to mention the website -- Internet Accelerator, Internet Accelerator Download, Web Accelerator, Dial-Up Accelerators (http://www.propel.com)

Dialup accelerators are designed to compress the web browsing (both HTML and images -- so images look sligh lower quality when browsing the web -- but I don't notice very much this in "Allow Moderate Reduction". And you always have the option to reload a webpage without compression too)

Here are settings that I use to save a lot of data:

1. Right click Propel system tray icon
2. Click "Options"
3. DISABLE the "Use Dynamic Imaging when possible"
(For Rogers cellphone users this is a useful data savings: This is progressive download that gradually replaces low quality images with high quality images. But I wanted to save bandwidth usage, so I only wanted it to download images once.)
4. Enable "Block banner ads and other in-page advertisements". This doesn't always work on all webpages, but it saves data when it works. Bye bye, bandwidth-hogging Flash Video advertisements - gone!
5. Click "Allow moderate reduction" (recommended for 25 MB plan users)
or "Allow significant reduction" (recommended for 200 MB plan users)

Also, Propel automatically disables itself when you use a WiFi connection -- it's pretty unobtrusive software. You can manually enable/disable (pretty popular and is one of the "big safe brands" in dialup acceleration -- not like the terrible dialup accelerators that are full of adware)

It's rather similiar to how Opera Mini and BlackBerry browser (and a few other mobile browser products) compresses web browser - except this is for desktop and everything else works perfectly (AJAX, JavaScript, etc). So even my online banking and full GMAIL works fine through this accelerator software...

[snowskier79]

Wirelessly posted (8700c: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) BlackBerry8100/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/102)

Thanks for the review and intel Mark!