Using FreeBSD and mobile phones (specifically Mot L7089)

Roger Hardiman roger at cs.strath.ac.uk
Thu May 11 10:35:10 BST 2000


David,

I forgot to answer the original question.

There is no Infra Red support under FreeBSD.
Linux has lots of it so there is potential for
grabbing code from there but it still means
lots of coding.

We use PCMCIA cards with our Nokia (5.1) mobile
phones.
The FreeBSD pcmcia code recognises our Nokia
cards and presents it as a new serial port (sio2 or
sio3) and the card has a standard set of AT codes.
So in some cases we just run PPP where the modem
is sio2 (ie the mobile phone). In other cases, we drive
the phones directly, but they just appear as a normal
modem with AT codes.

This is all very slow.

Current mobile phones are 9.6kbps compared
to your 56k modem you probably have at home.

Some phones and some service providers can boost
this to 14.4k if you have a good signal.
I'm not sure which phones support this and which providers
support it.

The future is the new Nokia HSCSD phones which can
give you 28.8kbps. (and in some cases 43.2k)
by obtaining multiple channels to the base station.

Take a look at www.nokia.com for HSCSD details.

The future is only a few months away anyway.
I've seen HSCSD working here in the UK, but
cannot really say much about it.


(in the longer term, the 3rd Generation UMTS
hardware will give you 64k with the option to get
extra time slots, increasing your bandwidth in multiples
of 64k upto 2 megabits)


Roger




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