Greece GPRS? - Page 2

unobtrusive · 22-06-2007, 20:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by gmmour

For a postpaid plan you have to visit a WIND store. If you pay by credit card it would be very easy to get a contract, although I don't know if a greek tax-number (AFM) is a prerequisite for a postpaid account... If it is, you can get one with a simple application at a local IRS office (Eforia in greek). You don't need a bank account, and since you are an EU citizen, the only thing they'll ask for is your credit card!

Are you sure about this last statement? Until fairly recently all the mobile operators insisted on seeing your tax declaration for the last year or at the very least some form of documentation proving your income is above a certain amount (e.g official declaration from your employer).

Has something changed recently? Is this specific to WIND?

gmmour · 04-07-2007, 11:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by unobtrusive

Are you sure about this last statement? Until fairly recently all the mobile operators insisted on seeing your tax declaration for the last year or at the very least some form of documentation proving your income is above a certain amount (e.g official declaration from your employer).

Has something changed recently? Is this specific to WIND?

Since 2002 I have made two contracts for myself (I don't have a tax declaration because I still don't pay any taxes), I was there when two friends of mine signed their contracts (they were foreign students so neither of them had a tax declaration form) and all of us paid using a credit card.

They never even asked for a proof of the tax-number (AFM)... As soon as you give them a credit card, they don't ask for your tax declaration and you get an online credit approval in seconds.

If you wish to pay in any other way except for credit cards then they ask for a tax declaration form and proof of your AFM, if you don't provide them with a tax declaration then the situation on credit approval varies between the providers. Vodafone usually gets back with a positive approval in two hours from the time you went to the store while WIND usually gives the approval again in some minutes! It has happened to a friend of mine who comes from an asian country, is studying in Greece, doesn't pay taxes and doesn't have an income and also doesn't have a credit card! At Wind (back then Telestet) he got the approval in three minutes without any of the above (just his passport) and at vodafone he got the approval for his line in three hours, and that's back in 2003. I think now things have gotten even easier. I don't think they ask for any of the above mentioned proofs of income any more, a lot of university students sign postpaid contracts without credit cards all the time!

DaveRo · 04-07-2007, 11:55

...and please let us know here how you get on. I'll be sailing from Italy to Greece soon, so I'd be interested in your experiences - particularly with GPRS on the islands.

Dave

gmmour · 05-07-2007, 02:04

My recent experience with WIND plus non-stop:

Last week I was in Larissa at my parents' house where they finally decided to get ADSL but when I was there they had just applied the previous day and waiting for activation...

Dialup was just stepping on my nerves so I connected my laptop to my sony ericsson, I put the proxy settings on Opera and IE and there it went surfing and chatting on MSN with 3G speeds! It was fantastic! It would even reach some 300 Mbps!

And then I went to our cottage on the Thessalian beach of Velika (no 3G there from Wind, only Cosmote...) where we don't even have a fixed phone and I surfed from our patio on 2G speeds and it went just fine (even if we had a fixed line, the fastest thing available there on the beach is ISDN)! It worked smoothly enough in order for me to open 10 news articles and some 10 threads on my favourite fora simultaneously and read them while chatting on MSN Messenger and while all my neighboors and especially their kids who were missing their home internet connection would gather around me and seemed quite amazed that I was surfing from there while begging me to let them surf on the internet or let them connect their laptop on my cellphone! That was quite irritating I can admit!

It is also amazing that 2G GPRS seems to work really faster than dialup with a fixed phone line!

Just plain delight! I was so excited!

AndreA · 05-07-2007, 07:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by gmmour

It is also amazing that 2G GPRS seems to work really faster than dialup with a fixed phone line!

EDGE?

gmmour · 05-07-2007, 13:44

No, I don't think so... My Sony Ericsson W880i doesn't do EDGE... Probably I was excited just to have internet access down there at the beach and everything seemed so perfect

It seems that dialup service is just crappy at my parents' house! They got ADSL up and running today hurrah! (But I'm not there and they don't bother connecting the modem themselves...)

tahop · **Aircards can be used -** 12-07-2007, 07:37

I sit worth me purchasing an unlocked aircard....I already have a cell phone with an COSMOTE number, so I would have to get a new SIM card to utilize with my laptop. Which way is the best?

caliston · **Experiences -** 12-07-2007, 10:30

I got back from 3 weeks in Greece yesterday... time to relate my experiences:

I already had a TIM SIM - dropped it into my phone (a Nokia 6820) in the airport and up popped 'WIND GR' on the display. Last topped it up in October and it was making calls fine. I had about EUR 5 balance left.

Next, text PLUS to 349. No problems, WIND Plus enabled. I then set up the phone to do WIND WAP as described here, and it worked! AFAICS I've not been charged any more for the use of data.

First thing to note: Bluetooth phones are very handy. GSM signals don't seem to go through reinforced concrete buildings very well, with the result that often in the middle of the building the phone shows <25% signal. This causes GPRS to be slow, break up, or not work at all. In most cases I got 80-100% signal on the balcony on one side of the buildings I was in, so I left the phone on the balcony and connected to it using Bluetooth from inside (up to about 8m away).

Second thing to note: WIND WAP's proxy mangles HTML. That means often pages would come up with XML parsing errors in Firefox. IE was about as bad and Opera was slightly better, but the problem seems to be that the proxy occasionally removes spaces from within HTML tags, causing the browser to complain.

The connection was a bit more flaky than I'm used to with GPRS: even with the phone claiming 100% of signal (in many cases with direct line-of-sight to the base station on the mountain 1.6km above me) I'd have to try several times to connect, or the connection would drop. It might have been slightly more stable in Athens than Kefalonia, but it was pretty similar. From watching the activity lights in Windows it appeared the connection would fail to receive anything and have to retry several times until it arrived.

Third thing to note: my phone does 2.5G, that is it has EDGE but not 3G. The Bluetooth connection claims 460Kbps but that's just to the phone - I got a maximum of about 4Kbytes/s download speed. I didn't find anywhere that did EDGE.

I installed Opera Mini on my phone... quite impressed, given my phone is one of the very early Java phones that can't cope with programs more than 64KB. It didn't seem to run into the proxy mangling problem. It did keep crashing if you view too many pages, but I think that was it running out of memory (other Java apps easily run out of memory too on my phone).

Anyway, I asked about SSH. What I discovered is that the proxy is an HTTP proxy that only accepts CONNECT requests to port 443. You can make it talk SSH, but you'll need an SSH server that runs on port 443 rather than the usual 22. I used PuTTY successfully to connect, here are the settings:

Session:
Hostname mysshserver.example.com
Port 443
Protocol SSH

Connection:
Seconds between keepalives 15

Connection->Proxy:
Proxy type HTTP
Proxy hostname 192.168.200.10
Port 9401
Do DNS lookup at proxy end Yes

The above directs SSH connections through the proxy. The keepalives option is because the proxy has a fairly low timeout - it'll close connections that are idle for more than a few tens of seconds, so the keepalives ensures the SSH session doesn't disappear if you stop typing.

With all this I managed to connect successfully to my SSH server on port 443. Latency was a little slower than I'm used to on GPRS... in other words a bit to slow to type interactively - probably a latency of 1-3s. Given the frequent connection dropouts I experienced, if you SSH into Unix I strongly recommend installing GNU Screen which will preserve what you're doing if the connection drops and you need to reconnect.

Given the mangling HTTP proxy, I also used the SSH session to tunnel HTTP traffic to a web proxy I knew worked:

Connection->SSH->Tunnels:
Source port 1234
Destination port webcache.example.com:8080
Local ticked
then click Add

I set up Firefox to use a proxy of 'localhost' port 1234, which is then forwarded by PuTTY to connect to the webcache on port 8080. This made many websites work, and also gets around the 1MB download limit. Given the limited bandwidth I also ticked:

Connection->SSH:
Enabled compression

Not sure how much difference it made, but I think it helped a bit for HTML. One warning: if the PuTTY session drops and you start a new one, make sure you change the 1234 to something new (perhaps 1235, 1236 and so on) in the tunnel Source port setting (you'll have to delete the old tunnel and add a new one) and in your browser's proxy settings. This is because the old PuTTY will keep listening on port 1234 even for a short while after you kill it, and so the new PuTTY won't be able to listen there. That means web browser connections will appear to work but will never actually receive anything, unless you change to new port numbers. I'd be interested to know if there's a better workaround.

Total traffic: about 70MB
Cost with Virgin GPRS (UK or roaming): £350
Cost with WIND WAP: EUR3.49

I'm going to see if I can find a 3G phone to take with me next time - hopefully that might help the latency problems.

caliston · 12-07-2007, 10:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by tahop

I sit worth me purchasing an unlocked aircard....I already have a cell phone with an COSMOTE number, so I would have to get a new SIM card to utilize with my laptop. Which way is the best?

Does your phone already do data and is it unlocked? If it can do Bluetooth (and if you laptop can also) I'd recommend using it, because you can move it around to get the best signal (see my post above). I have no experience of datacards (maybe they have better antennas) but it would be more annoying to find the best signal was with the laptop on the baking hot balcony, for example.

Getting a new SIM isn't expensive (about 20EUR I think). In fact you could probably also pick up a secondhand phone with data for not very much. Possibly a bit trickier in the US, but my Nokia 6820 was £30 from Ebay UK about 6 months ago.

gmmour · 15-07-2007, 01:51

Hi,
A new Wind F2G (PAYG) SIM card costs 5€ and gives you 5€ of airtime (1€ every month for the five first months provided that you top-up at least once per month).

The XML parsing error (at least in Opera) is prevalent but you just have to click on the "reparse page as HTML" tag and it will work, but it is annoying...

The Wind proxy makes the connection quite slower and latencies longer...
Opera mini is great and doesn't have problems because it first passes and filters the pages you request through Opera's own servers so the pages that arrive on your phone are preformated by Opera and images shrinked in order for them to download fast and easy on your mobile. Some time Opera Mini freaks out but I think that's a problem of the Opera servers, as at the same time the GPRS connection through the laptop works fine...

Bluetooth is the best solution to get good signal.

Finally, Wind has EDGE support installed on all base stations since 2004 but they have never given it to the public for their own unknown reasons, some say they don't have adequate backbone in rural Greece for that... Probably they didn't bother since they offered 3G in cities where they have interest by business users but it would be great for them to offer EDGE everywhere on their GSM footprint!

Cosmote recently announced they covered 80% of their network with 3GSM and they're planning to have a complete network overlay with 3GSM by the end of the year, which means that Cosmote will cover the entire country with 3GSM! Wind and Vodafone GR are not even close to that, covering only cities!!!

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	(#13)
DaveRo (Offline) Senior Member Prepaid Fan Posts: 153 Join Date: 07 Jul 2006 Country:	04-07-2007, 11:55 ...and please let us know here how you get on. I'll be sailing from Italy to Greece soon, so I'd be interested in your experiences - particularly with GPRS on the islands. Dave

	(#14)
gmmour (Offline) Member Advanced Member Posts: 92 Join Date: 03 Oct 2006 Country:	05-07-2007, 02:04 My recent experience with WIND plus non-stop: Last week I was in Larissa at my parents' house where they finally decided to get ADSL but when I was there they had just applied the previous day and waiting for activation... Dialup was just stepping on my nerves so I connected my laptop to my sony ericsson, I put the proxy settings on Opera and IE and there it went surfing and chatting on MSN with 3G speeds! It was fantastic! It would even reach some 300 Mbps! And then I went to our cottage on the Thessalian beach of Velika (no 3G there from Wind, only Cosmote...) where we don't even have a fixed phone and I surfed from our patio on 2G speeds and it went just fine (even if we had a fixed line, the fastest thing available there on the beach is ISDN)! It worked smoothly enough in order for me to open 10 news articles and some 10 threads on my favourite fora simultaneously and read them while chatting on MSN Messenger and while all my neighboors and especially their kids who were missing their home internet connection would gather around me and seemed quite amazed that I was surfing from there while begging me to let them surf on the internet or let them connect their laptop on my cellphone! That was quite irritating I can admit! It is also amazing that 2G GPRS seems to work really faster than dialup with a fixed phone line! Just plain delight! I was so excited!

	(#16)
gmmour (Offline) Member Advanced Member Posts: 92 Join Date: 03 Oct 2006 Country:	05-07-2007, 13:44 No, I don't think so... My Sony Ericsson W880i doesn't do EDGE... Probably I was excited just to have internet access down there at the beach and everything seemed so perfect It seems that dialup service is just crappy at my parents' house! They got ADSL up and running today hurrah! (But I'm not there and they don't bother connecting the modem themselves...)

	(#17)
tahop (Offline) Junior Member Newbie Posts: 1 Join Date: 12 Jul 2007 Country:	Aircards can be used - 12-07-2007, 07:37 I sit worth me purchasing an unlocked aircard....I already have a cell phone with an COSMOTE number, so I would have to get a new SIM card to utilize with my laptop. Which way is the best?

	(#18)
caliston (Offline) Junior Member Amateur Member Posts: 22 Join Date: 11 Jun 2007 Country:	Experiences - 12-07-2007, 10:30 I got back from 3 weeks in Greece yesterday... time to relate my experiences: I already had a TIM SIM - dropped it into my phone (a Nokia 6820) in the airport and up popped 'WIND GR' on the display. Last topped it up in October and it was making calls fine. I had about EUR 5 balance left. Next, text PLUS to 349. No problems, WIND Plus enabled. I then set up the phone to do WIND WAP as described here, and it worked! AFAICS I've not been charged any more for the use of data. First thing to note: Bluetooth phones are very handy. GSM signals don't seem to go through reinforced concrete buildings very well, with the result that often in the middle of the building the phone shows <25% signal. This causes GPRS to be slow, break up, or not work at all. In most cases I got 80-100% signal on the balcony on one side of the buildings I was in, so I left the phone on the balcony and connected to it using Bluetooth from inside (up to about 8m away). Second thing to note: WIND WAP's proxy mangles HTML. That means often pages would come up with XML parsing errors in Firefox. IE was about as bad and Opera was slightly better, but the problem seems to be that the proxy occasionally removes spaces from within HTML tags, causing the browser to complain. The connection was a bit more flaky than I'm used to with GPRS: even with the phone claiming 100% of signal (in many cases with direct line-of-sight to the base station on the mountain 1.6km above me) I'd have to try several times to connect, or the connection would drop. It might have been slightly more stable in Athens than Kefalonia, but it was pretty similar. From watching the activity lights in Windows it appeared the connection would fail to receive anything and have to retry several times until it arrived. Third thing to note: my phone does 2.5G, that is it has EDGE but not 3G. The Bluetooth connection claims 460Kbps but that's just to the phone - I got a maximum of about 4Kbytes/s download speed. I didn't find anywhere that did EDGE. I installed Opera Mini on my phone... quite impressed, given my phone is one of the very early Java phones that can't cope with programs more than 64KB. It didn't seem to run into the proxy mangling problem. It did keep crashing if you view too many pages, but I think that was it running out of memory (other Java apps easily run out of memory too on my phone). Anyway, I asked about SSH. What I discovered is that the proxy is an HTTP proxy that only accepts CONNECT requests to port 443. You can make it talk SSH, but you'll need an SSH server that runs on port 443 rather than the usual 22. I used PuTTY successfully to connect, here are the settings: Session: Hostname mysshserver.example.com Port 443 Protocol SSH Connection: Seconds between keepalives 15 Connection->Proxy: Proxy type HTTP Proxy hostname 192.168.200.10 Port 9401 Do DNS lookup at proxy end Yes The above directs SSH connections through the proxy. The keepalives option is because the proxy has a fairly low timeout - it'll close connections that are idle for more than a few tens of seconds, so the keepalives ensures the SSH session doesn't disappear if you stop typing. With all this I managed to connect successfully to my SSH server on port 443. Latency was a little slower than I'm used to on GPRS... in other words a bit to slow to type interactively - probably a latency of 1-3s. Given the frequent connection dropouts I experienced, if you SSH into Unix I strongly recommend installing GNU Screen which will preserve what you're doing if the connection drops and you need to reconnect. Given the mangling HTTP proxy, I also used the SSH session to tunnel HTTP traffic to a web proxy I knew worked: Connection->SSH->Tunnels: Source port 1234 Destination port webcache.example.com:8080 Local ticked then click Add I set up Firefox to use a proxy of 'localhost' port 1234, which is then forwarded by PuTTY to connect to the webcache on port 8080. This made many websites work, and also gets around the 1MB download limit. Given the limited bandwidth I also ticked: Connection->SSH: Enabled compression Not sure how much difference it made, but I think it helped a bit for HTML. One warning: if the PuTTY session drops and you start a new one, make sure you change the 1234 to something new (perhaps 1235, 1236 and so on) in the tunnel Source port setting (you'll have to delete the old tunnel and add a new one) and in your browser's proxy settings. This is because the old PuTTY will keep listening on port 1234 even for a short while after you kill it, and so the new PuTTY won't be able to listen there. That means web browser connections will appear to work but will never actually receive anything, unless you change to new port numbers. I'd be interested to know if there's a better workaround. Total traffic: about 70MB Cost with Virgin GPRS (UK or roaming): £350 Cost with WIND WAP: EUR3.49 I'm going to see if I can find a 3G phone to take with me next time - hopefully that might help the latency problems. Last edited by caliston; 12-07-2007 at 10:36..

	(#20)
gmmour (Offline) Member Advanced Member Posts: 92 Join Date: 03 Oct 2006 Country:	15-07-2007, 01:51 Hi, A new Wind F2G (PAYG) SIM card costs 5€ and gives you 5€ of airtime (1€ every month for the five first months provided that you top-up at least once per month). The XML parsing error (at least in Opera) is prevalent but you just have to click on the "reparse page as HTML" tag and it will work, but it is annoying... The Wind proxy makes the connection quite slower and latencies longer... Opera mini is great and doesn't have problems because it first passes and filters the pages you request through Opera's own servers so the pages that arrive on your phone are preformated by Opera and images shrinked in order for them to download fast and easy on your mobile. Some time Opera Mini freaks out but I think that's a problem of the Opera servers, as at the same time the GPRS connection through the laptop works fine... Bluetooth is the best solution to get good signal. Finally, Wind has EDGE support installed on all base stations since 2004 but they have never given it to the public for their own unknown reasons, some say they don't have adequate backbone in rural Greece for that... Probably they didn't bother since they offered 3G in cities where they have interest by business users but it would be great for them to offer EDGE everywhere on their GSM footprint! Cosmote recently announced they covered 80% of their network with 3GSM and they're planning to have a complete network overlay with 3GSM by the end of the year, which means that Cosmote will cover the entire country with 3GSM! Wind and Vodafone GR are not even close to that, covering only cities!!!