More information
 

First of all, I want to thank you for this very interesting post. I go to Greece every year in summer to spend my holidays... and I love Greece (my grandmother is greek). Every year the problem is always the same: internet. So I hope next July to apply the counsel of this post.

But I want to ask you:
1) Where should I buy a new prepaid card wind? every kiosk?
2) On the website Wind have read that i should send a message ‘PLUS’ to 19349 (and not 349 as indicated in the post)
3) After I buy the sim, are there already the WIND plus settings on the phone?
4) What should I do to use the phone with my laptop? I mean... you wrote: "
In order to use the WIND plus service with a computer tethered to your mobile phone, you have to enter the following settings to your computer:
access point "gwap.b-online.gr", username "wap", password "wap" for your cellphone's PC suite and you also have to set the following proxy server on your web browser IP: 192.168.200.10 port: 9401 as well as on the windows connections panel (for IE and MSN Messenger)". Where should I cahnge exactly this parameters for the browser? In whick window?
5) is there a way to download more than 1 MB? I have seen on the posts that may be there is a way, but I have not understood completely

Thank you very much for your answers

A Greek would best answer that, but in Corfu town there were several shops run by Wind, Cosmote, and Vodafone. I bought the Wind card and a Cosmote card at these. (It seemed much like Italy.)
Yes - I used that number.
There is a facility on the Wind website to specify your phone and send it WAP settings. On my phone (Nok N70) these settings do not configure laptop tethering - they just make the phone browser work.
I set the access point in the phone (under 'packet data') but you might have to set it in the operating system under dial-up connections. I don't use Windows so I'll let someone else say how to do that. What OS and browser do you want to use?

Proxy: I'm using Firefox (on Linux) and the proxy is set in the Firefox configuration - under 'connection'.
As the OP mentioned, if you use a different access point you don't have all these restrictions. But it costs more.
You're welcome.

Take a look also at the numerous Cosmote data options - more expensive but perhaps simpler. (I bought a Cosmokarte as well. Does anybody know what SMS to send to get a balance?)

All the SMS short codes in Greece changed recently due to the National Renumbering that recently included SMS shortcodes. The new activation procedure for wind plus non-stop is sending "PLUS" to 19349.

Customer care is 1260 (0,24 EUR per call) for all questions and 1231 free of charge (only for Wind plus). Ask them how you change the language, or they can change it for you... Unfortunately I don't currently have a wind prepaid so I don't know the procedure. Anywayz, by sending a blank SMS to 1269 you get your balance by SMS free of charge, and by sending the recharge voucher code to 1268 you top-up, so you don't need to change the language prompts...

The Wind F2G SIM pack can be bought at omnipresent kiosks (called periptero, if you've been to Greece you've probably seen them all over the place, most if not all periptera carry prepaid SIM packs from all carriers and all of them carry recharge vouchers) and wind stores around Greece, it costs 5 Euro and gives 1 Euro initial credit and 1 Euro every month for the next 4 months provided you have spent at least 1 Euro in the previous month, i.e. you get the 5 Euro back if you use your phone for 5 months and spend at least 1 Euro every month.

For tethering: The settings for the Access point go to the phone's PC suite, depending on the phone you use. Some Sony Ericsson phones, also create an automatic connection when you plug in the USB to you computer, so you have to enter the access point settings under the USB connection settings in your phone. The proxy settings go to your browser. For Firefox and Opera use the connections tab, for IE and MSN Messenger use the connections settings in the IE Properties window.

For phone use: Either call 1231 free of charge and ask them to send you the WAP settings, or visit the wind.com.gr site and use the online tool to send the settings to your phone or find the manual settings if your phone model is not supported.

For your information, Nokia Maps, works with the wind plus access point, but for A-GPS to work (and get a faster initial satellite detection on your Nokia phone, you have to use Wind Internet as the access point for the A-GPS facility of the phone, which only consumes about 7KB every time your phone tries to find a satellite for the first time, while still using the Wind Plus access point for Nokia Maps, Google maps and map downloads). If you don't set the A-GPS access point to Wind Internet, you practically have no A-GPS and it can take up to 5 minutes for your phone to detect the satellites and calculate your position, whilst with A-GPS it takes only a few seconds.

Hi guys,
I feel so lucky that i found this thread... been trying to research greece prepaid gprs, with not much luck.

I see that most people here are OK with wind plus non-stop service. Well, unfortunately that won't work for me - i need a bunch of ports and relatively reliable connection (will need it for work emergencies). I do intend to pay for it, but the question is what to buy...

On Wind, it seems that the only good option is:
http://www.wind.com.gr/pages.fds?pageID=1443&langID=2
i.e. ADSM Non-stop. I don't even have 3G phone, i just need some reasonably priced service (i will be there for two weeks)

What is the rate for normal Wind per-mb gprs connection? I can't find it in any price lists. I bet it's too much, i just want to compare.

What about other guys? I read on vodaphone pre-paid terms that they don't even give you gprs. Fine. What about Cosmote? They have specificaly data plans on their pre-paid page, i guess this one:
http://www.cosmote.gr/cosmote/cosmot...rviceCategory=
but nothing mentioned in the price list...

I will need probably around 200Mb of data for the entire 14 days i will be there, and don't need 3G (although i am sure my 2.5G phone will work on 3G data plans like ADSM, at least that's the theory) , so i am kinda lost... 200Mb is too much for normal Wind pre-paid service (which is about 1.4 euros per Mb, from this thread, right?)

Prepaid Internet on Cosmote or Wind?
 

I have read all previous post. I have read some time ago that mobile Internet on Greece is not allowed for pay-by-use (prepaid) SIM cards. But know, I understand from previous post that it is possible with Wind and Cosmote? :o
Can I buy a SIM card from WInd or Cosmote, put it on my unlocked Treo and be browsing and fetching email in minutes? Must I do any other tramit or call to customer care to activate it?

An irony of the HTML mangling caused by PLUS non-stop is that I cannot read this forum at all with my Nokia N810 (which is what I'm using day-to-day because I don't usually have enough power for the laptop on the boat) so I've only just seen this post. I have to use the laptop with Firefox and the Force Content Type addon.

The effect of the WIND proxy with the Nokia is very variable - sites that work one day don't the next, and sometimes I'm fed WAP-style content, sometimes not. It works with simple websites but not with many blogs and forums.

So I too would like a reasonable prepaid internet solution - something like the Italian WIND offers. I would be happy to pay 20 to 30 Euro a month while I'm here in Greece.

Cosmote do have internet offers - and I have a Cosmokarte SIM - but they're difficult to understand and seem expensive.

If anybody knows of anything please post it here.

A couple of things I discovered about Wind Plus non-stop:
- The subscription lasts one calendar month not 30 days.
- I got an SMS telling me it had expired on the day that it expired - but late in that day (I had already resubscribed)

None of the SMSs I got said when it was going to expire - so remember when you subscribed.

At the time of writing, the Force Content Type add-on I was using has not been updated for Firefox 3. When I return to Greece I shall take a copy of Firefox 2 and Opera with me on the laptop. I still don't have a solution on the Nokia N810.

Hello!
I'm writing you with my laptop using opera and wind plus non stop.

But I have some problems.
1) I cannot read my yahoo e-mail, using whatever browser. It seems wind plus non stop doesn't allow it.
2) I'm in Chalkidiki. Often it seems that this wind plus non stop doesn't work or is too slow. Are there other particular settings for the browsers or something else?

Thank you.

I concluded that many (all?) sites that uses AJAX (asynchronous javascript and XML) won't work. At least they won't when parsed as html in Firefox - I don't know about Opera. The wordpress blog editor doesn't. Nor does gmail - if you use the standard GUI. But the old basic html GUI works - and I used the mobile one which is quicker.

Does yahoo mail have a similar html or mobile interface? I would have thought so.
I used it in several places in the Ionian. I found that the speed varied with location and time of day - I assumed it was due to network capacity. It was always fastest early in the morning. And I got 3G five miles offshore from Parga!

I'm now back in the UK experimenting with proxies and looking for a solution for the Nokia N810 and for Firefox 3 on the laptop. The perl proxy posted by caliston in an earlier post
http://www.prepaidgsm.net/forum/show...1&postcount=39
works on my Linux laptop - at least it does with a different proxy - I can't try the Wind one from here. (Thanks caliston.) Just to clarify his instructions, you set your http proxy to localhost:3128 - the Wind proxy address is in the perl module so you can change it to experiment.

No luck with the Nokia yet. Maybe some of my perl libraries are i86 specific. If any perl experts can help me debug the Nokia please pm me - I've never used perl before.

was/is ''Wind Plus non-stop'' not originally to be a WAP-only service? could this not be the reason
that certain things are blocked and cannot be made to work? even if it worked before, maybe they
got smart and noticed how many users were actually on laptops etc.

see my post on the sticky above: i have a feeling the service is turned off, or at least not offered
anymore to new customers. wish somebody in GR cld check and confirm this, either way, as i will
only be there late july.

greetings - heinz -

Your best chance is to go with the mobile version of the site. Yahoo! mail has one for sure!

The service is still available! Here's the refference on their site you were looking for in the other thread: http://www.wind.com.gr/pages.fds?langid=2&pageid=1512

Yes, I'm sure that is the reason. I was sometimes served WML pages instead of html - I assume that the proxy was altering the http requests in some way.Maybe they read this forum! I don't think they could reliably detect whether someone is using a tethered laptop, but they could certainly look at the browser identification strings (UA string) and detect browsers that don't run on phones. I was going to try changing the UA string of Firefox to Opera Mini to see if it was any better. But I doubt if Wind are bothered by a few people using the service in this way; we are paying, and it won't have much effect on the service.I return in late August so let us know how you get on.

As I said above, I'd use and pay for a proper internet service if there was one at a reasonable price - like with WInd Italy. (Are you reading this, Wind GR?)

>> I'd use and pay for a proper internet service

thats probably the issue, because what is paid now (under 4 EUR/month) is plain luck on our side.
and if it is correct that thousands of students found out, and were using that 'service', i would not
like, but understand WINDs reaction - comparable real services, if at all available for tourists,
being 40-100 EUR/m.

has anybody ever used that service on modems like the HUAWEI E220? what would the setting be?

the EU has come up with a new regulation (yesterday?), and as far as i know, greece would be
included in some reduced cost schemes that ORANGE (and others) immediately announced.
give it a few days to be sorted out. either way.

greetings - heinz -

I think I now have a work-round to the HTML mangling (XML parsing error) problem caused by Wind's WAP Proxy. It uses privoxy and seems to work on both my laptop and the Nokia N810 tablet - though I cannot test it with Wind's proxy from here in the UK. It changes the http 'content type' header to text/html which (in Firefox at least) stops the browser trying to parse as XML.

The relevant configuration lines are:

In config:
# Wind's proxy server
forward / 192.168.200.10:9401

In user.action:
# Change content type on all sites to html
{+server-header-filter{xml-to-html}}
/

Install, run, and set up privoxy as in its documentation.

Feedback from anyone in Greece using Wind + Non-Stop welcome. I've only tried it with Mozilla-based browsers.

Technical thread about privoxy on the Nokia tablet here.

Wind plus with nokia e90
 

Hi!

Thanks for all good info in this thread. I have used wind plus with my Nokia E90 for 10- days on my vacation at Naxos.

It just works perfect with the built in browser. Better than with Opera mini in fact. I have not had any problems downloading large pages or reading https-pages.

The only thing I have not figured out is how to listen to live internet-radio. I have done the settings in real player (real player installed on my E90) with the proxies mentioned in this thread but it still does not work. Any ideas?

Pontus

I need simple wap over gprs in greece for 10 days.. which operator and packet would you sugest me ? the most important to me is price of data transfered via gprs (I'll not download more then 3-4 megabytes) and price of sms to foreign networks.


thanks

@pontusb: This the "catch"! The Wind Plus proxy does not allow streaming! That's why you can browse without problems but you can't use neither streaming nor POP, IMAP e-mail servers...
I agree that the Nokia Browser on newer N-series phones is far better than Opera. The bad thing is that if you don't have 3G it takes time to load the pictures, whilst Opera compresses the pictures and it takes less time when not under 3G coverage!

BUT! Opera Mini is annoying compared to Nokia (or other phone browsers) because it goes through an Opera proxy in Norway and most times of the day this Opera proxy is so congested that you might wait for minutes for a page to load on Opera mini, whilst a phone browser directly connects to the internet and works fine all day long!

@vladabgd: The best offer as described here is Wind Plus Non-stop which will cost you a flat rate of 3,49 for your 10 days in Greece. As long as you don't want to download big files (larger than 1MB each) and you just browse websites and access webmail (not POP or IMAP mail, only webmail) then it will work just fine for you.
Buy a Wind F2G prepaid SIM from any kiosk in Greece and send "PLUS" to 19349, after that 3,49 Euros will be deducted from your balance (so make sure you have at least 4-5 Euro balance before you do that) and you will have unlimited internet access through the Wind GPRS access point (download settings online at www.wind.com.gr).

Wind F2G prepaid offers a basic package as well as "price commitment" packages that match virtually all competitive offers in the Greek market, just do your math on the www.wind.com.gr website and find out which package suits you best and activate it on your F2G mobile for free! It is good that they match all competitive offers from other networks (Cosmote, Vodafone and MVNOs) so you don't have to worry about not getting as good prices as with another company...

Have a good time in Greece!

Will cost how many card Wind F2G prepaid SIM? Will be possible it to activate internet from limit 3,49 Euro too directly Wind Plus Non-stop ?
Do something belong to buy else?

Online translators are pure crap...

A Wind F2G prepaid SIM costs 5 Euro and will give you 1 Euro upon activation and 1 Euro every month for the next four months, provided that you have spent at least 1 Euro in the previous month. This means that in 5 months from activation you get your 5 Euro back... Confusing, if you try to decode that on an online translator...

You can activate Wind plus non-stop at any time, if you have at least 3,49 Euro balance in your account. This means you have to top-up before you activate wind plus non-stop...

You don't have to buy anything else...

Powodzenia translating...

Yes I know, translators translate not well .W this case, not just me 5 euro pre-paid and all, thanks for your help.

It is available via WAP? whether they will work instant messaging? Skype mobile, Tolakanaut, gadu-gadu?

Hi All

I have read this thread with interest but not a massive amount of understanding.

I will be on a boat in the Southern Aegean for much of the next month. I have a laptop and an Irish Vodafone mobile modem (3G). Assuming I can keep power in the laptop can anyone tell me how or whether the vodafone modem will work for internet access at all?

I can prepay for 200MB of data alright - I just want to know whether to bother.

Thanks in advance.


Lar

Tried the Firefox addon
 

Hi!

And thank You.

Just tried the Firefox addon with Firefox 2 on my Mac and with You suggested rules. It works perfect.

/Pontus

Im guessing that uploads from phone to Flickr or such with Nokia Share or Shozu will not work with WIND Plus?

Back in Greece with Wind plus non-stop (Ionian islands) and can confirm that Privoxy solves the HTML/XML mangling problem. Firefox 3 on the laptop and the Nokia N810 work fine.

Next problem: why does http://www.guardian.co.uk give 'Endless redirection of reqests for this address'? (This happened before I used Privoxy and with both Firefox and the N810 which is also a gecko browser.) Something to do with the Wind proxy, I suspect. What's it doing? With Privoxy I can filter & spoof HTTP headers so maybe I can cure this.

I am in Greece with Wind non-stop and can confirm the Guardian loads easily with Opera after clicking the Reparse document as HTML message once.

I use an Sierra PC card with the Wind SIM on XP. I have settled into a process of using IE for gmail and Opera for everything else. I have never been able to get Firefox (or Thunderbird) to work with the Wind proxy.

We don't have a phone line and I'm too far from Arachova for 3G, but still it's great performance at an unbeatable price - I love it!

Thanks - that's a useful clue. Why should gecko cause or detect a redirect loop and not Opera, I wonder? I have not come accross any other site with this problem.

Thunderdird won't work because Wind NS only supports HTTP I think - ie ony browsers. No POP, IMAP, or NNTP.

Hi Guys,
i just bought a WIND sim but i can not activate the PLUS service. Whenever i try to send the SMS to 19349 my phone says "Please check your message service". Making calls works though. Any hints or do i need to call the hotline in this case?
Any help is appreciated, i'm online with my german card at the moment.

Chris

At Rhodes, I had Wind 3G coverage in the City of Rhodes, Paradeisi (Airport) and Maritsa (old airport area)! I didn't check my phone coverage in Lindos because I was too amazed by the spectacular view (first time on the island)...

I even visited my friend's father at his newly built home in a remote isolated farm behind the old Maritsa airport where he had just finished building a beautiful home and he equiped it with high-end PCs with Vodafone VMC 3G for internet (and he had 3G coverage) and Vodafone At Home fixed phone! I was amazed by the traditional house with all the modern amenities in the middle of nowhere!

@dg7feq: Have you activated the SIM, i.e. can you receive incoming calls? In order to activate the SIM you have to make a call to any chargeable number and listen through the whole activation message, after that you can hang up without completing the call and getting charged for it, but you have to listen to the whole message! After that you can send and receive SMS and you can receive incoming calls!
If you've done that, then make sure you have the correct SMSC number in your SMS settings, it's +30693599000 for Wind...
If you can't figure this out call 1260 (0,24EUR/call) they will help you find out why you can't send SMS and they will also activate Wind plus non-stop for you.

By the way, can you send SMS to other numbers besides 19349? Have you tried a different device? My best bet is the SMSC settings...

Hi, thanks for the useful information. I will try out today. I did not make a chargable action yet but when i ring my german phone it rings and if i call it from my german phone it rings as well. If i call balance check it tells me in greek and english that this service is not available. Maybe it is really not activated yet. Lets see if i can get it running. Will report back :-)

Chris

Weird! If you call it from your German phone and it rings, something is wrong... Why can't you call the balance inquiry number?

Are you sure its a Wind F2G and you're calling the right number? I.e. are you sure it's not a Wind Mo'Mad or Q-card or AB Supermarket Mobile (all kinda-MVNOs offered by Wind but with different offers and names)!

Howdy,
now i am online with the WIND card.
It was really weird. The card was actually working but not activated. I just called my german cellphone - there was noo welcome message. So i picked up the call (arrr more than a Euro). In this very moment a welcome-SMS arrived and from that moment on it was running smooth.

I am in Tolo at the moment and have good 3G coverage - up to 1 MBit of Datatransfer so far. Not bad for 3,50 Euro a month. Thanks gmmour for the support! :)

Chris

Normally, you only listen through the welcome message and this is it! You don't have to actually get charged for the call in order for the card to be activated...

Anywayz, you could've called a local number in order to get charged on local tarriffs...

For everybody's information 2106230000 for example is the automated calling center of Alpha Bank and it will always answer your call and charged at local tarriffs... You could've called 1260 too, it's Wind's customer care line and charged at a flat 24 cents/call...

yeah :) Afterwards i got the idea as well just to call the hotel desk or so. But as automated reaction i called my mobile for test (as i always do at work as i work in the GSM field)...

Chris

EDIT: Anybody got MSN live-Mail (aka Hotmail) running via the WIND card?

I did some testing and think there is a chance Hotmail will work. I get as far as entering a valid address and an invalid password (since I don't know the password for someone else's ID). It responds with a password error.

Email has been a continuing problem for me. I can only get gmail reliably from IE, but use Opera for most other things. I can not get signed in to Yahoo mail from any browser, it simply returns to the signon screen without any error. I can get signed in to Yahoo Groups, but I can't open any message because it reports I have cookies turned off.

I am on Naxos this week and did some tests with Chrome. Interestingly, I can open my.myway.com which fails on both Opera and IE.

I did some more tests as well.
You can send the login infomation but the mail website reloads in endless loop. There is too much ajax stuff on it to pass trough the proxy.
We solved the problem by putting the SIM in the phone and use Opera Mini - which gets everything trough very well.

BTW: We found out by chance that skype works very well also file transfers - even voice calls go trough without any problem and with good quality as long as you are on 3G...

Chris (near Kerkyra island, on WIND GR gprs)

I don't have a yahoo mail account but I do have yahoo logins for flickr. Lately i've been having problems with flickr over Wind NS. I used to be able to use the 'blog this' feature but now I can't. This happens a lot - things that work one day don't the next. And vice versa - I couldn't update my wordpress blog but now I can!

Using this Nokia N810 with its Gecko-based browser and Privoxy as described earlier I just called mail.yahoo.com It returned an application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml document - which I can't handle.

I'm getting more and more of these WAP documents. I used to be able to use timesonline but now I get a text/vnd.wap.wml doc returned. And it came from timesmobile.mobi - so either the times or the proxy has redirected me there. Does anyone understand what's happening here?

The N810's browser string starts "Firefox/3.0a1 Tablet Browser 0.2.2..." I get the same with Firefox on the laptop.

Dave
on Kefalonia

It seems that these pages automatically recognize that you are coming from a mobile carrier and from the WAP gateway. So they deliver the mobile page automatically and not the general page. As a hint: Use Opera as a browser for these pages, it can also read the WAP and xml-wap pages without conversion.

Chris - heavy rain in Ephirus.

So there's nothing I can do to tell the site I'm not a phone? Any HTTP headers I could add with Privoxy?

Opera isn't avaiilable for the Nokia N810 - or wasn't last time I looked. Actually, the N810 browser will display these WAP pages too - it's just not configured to do so. As will Firefox 3 - there's an addon to configure it.

I intend to use Fennec as soon as it's stable.

Thunderstorms in Kefalonia - hence doing this :-)

Dave