Sprint PCS, #777, and WordPress – Wierdo Problem

  • I’m trying to set up moblogging for a friend of mine and I’m encountering a very, very wierd problem.
    First, some background informaiton:
    You may or may not know it but most newer Sprint PCS phones can be used as high-speed (well, 128Kbit/sec) modems by any PC or Mac. All you need is a USB data cable (from RadioShack) and some drivers. You set it up like a normal PPP modem connection, using #777 as the phone number and leaving the username/password blank. It works quite well, actually. You can load a page like https://CNN.com in about 10-20 seconds.
    The Problem:
    My friend Bill runs <A HREF=”https://mulefan.com”>MuleFan.com</A&gt; and wants to start live blogging at local high school football games, so I set him up with the above-described connection. The connection worked–he was able to load the main page of his blog as well as CNN, etc. When he tried to login to his WP blog, however, things did not work. Every time he attempts to load anything in /wp-admin/, the browser gets stuck waiting for a response from the webserver. Sometimes, if you sit there and wait for two or three minutes, you might get a page load, but usually not. We confirmed this problem using Firefox and IE. While the browser is stuck waiting for a response from the web server, you can run some pings to various sites on the Net and they work just fine. You can also load other web pages, including web pages served from the same Apache installation that serves mulefan.com. You can load just about anything, but the WP admin pages refuse to load. We did a test and verified that we could reach the WP admin pages from a hardwired computer at the same time that his wireless setup could not.
    I’m totally baffled by this. I cannot think of any reason why this shouldn’t work. The bandwidth, AFAIK, used by the /wp-admin/ pages is not very big. It seems like they should load fast.
    Can somebody with a Sprint PCS phone and a data cable confirm this issue?
    Stumped,
    Chris

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Thread Starter terrapen

    (@terrapen)

    Oh, I forgot to mention:
    Using your Sprint PCS phone with a USB data cable does <B>not</B> incur any PCS Vision data charges. It only uses your minutes. Pretty cool, eh? If this problem could be fixed, this could be a very nice moblogging method.

    I’m pretty sure I have done posting while connected to my phone like this. The only downfall of connecting with #777 is that Sprint compresses all images that go over the line and make them look like crap. I will double check this when I get home tonight, but I believe it works fine with my Toshiba 4050, and before when I had an LG5350.
    Fair warning though – be careful using #777 too much. I have heard stories of people getting thier vision plans revoked from overuse. Technically the use of #777 with a computer violates your contract unless you have a data plan with one of the PCMCIA cards. I use it too, I just try to keep it to a minimum.
    By the way, if you or your friend have a picture phone, you might want to check out my new pluging SprintPhoto – https://bekit.net/archives/category/blog-development/
    -Brint

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Sprint PCS, #777, and WordPress – Wierdo Problem’ is closed to new replies.