[HaTaX]

I quite often would use my 8900's edge connection to get out to the internet from my netbook to update my emails. It was slow, but I let it do it's thing in the background while I was doing other work. Figured that the 9700's access to 3G would give a nice boost in that department. And truth be told, I have a Verizon Mifi that I get out most of the time now. I'm not always the best about remembering to keep it charged, and then it becomes a pita for me.

Early attempts at getting the modem over bluetooth with Win7 failed. It kept hanging up at the "Registering your computer on the network" dialog and would never get past that. I started playing with the fifo buffer settings in the modem dialog and low and behold, it starts working!

I found that you can use either the "wap.voicestream.com" or "epc.tmobile.com" in the initialization section and either will work. No need for a user name or password on the dial-up connection, and the standard *99# works just fine.

Been doing some playing around with port settings and such to see if I can get my speeds up, as they're pretty dismal over bluetooth right now and it actually seems it could be an OS issue on the 9700. Reason I say that is I test my port configuration with the phone hooked up on UMA so the carrier network and signal strength don't play a role in benchmarking. I use exactly the same benchmark (dslreports.net) 3 times with each setting and watch the average changes across tests to see what effect they're having on performance.

I have tried changing the port speed up to 921600, enabling and disabling various compression settings, different APN in the init string, etc. And nothing seems to have an impact on my overall speed, in the tests it seems to go fast, studder and stall, then ramp back up. Very odd behavior in that test as my trusty 8320 could easily zoom along near the 1MB range with no tweaks over the same UMA connection, the 8900 performed the same as well.

So I'm thinking because of this problem I'll be capped at the 300-400kb/s range when on the 3G network out and about. Still better then what I got with EDGE, but it'd be nice to see RIM get this one on their radar.

I just prefer using the bluetooth connection as it's so much cleaner then dealing with cables and you can use the built in windows utilities to connect without opening additional applications. Same reason I love the Mifi, just power it up and go.


Now some good news after being cautious of the UMA and bluetooth performance on a new device with an additional 3G radio in there to cause problems...

I tried making the phone fail with 2 head sets and just about every mix of connection type. I tried UMA-RadioOFF-Bluetooth to laptop and headset, WiFiOFF-3G-Bluetooth to laptop and headset, etc. and every single time it worked perfectly! And to add another bonus, the tether connection stays active and working while you're on a voice call. That's a pretty big win for me, and I can chat away on the headset, and do some quick online work on the laptop.

Hopefully other people will post in here their results on various OS versions as well as any tricks you've got to making bluetooth tethering a little easier. I'd like to see the bluetooth tether at least approach the 1000kb/s mark and I think T-Mo's network should be capable of that speed.

[lacroixn]

Wirelessly posted (blackberry pearl 8120)

Thanks for this detailed report.

[bzflagace]

What were the fifo buffer settings in the modem dialog that worked for you and how did you set them?

Thanks in advance!