[caliston]

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.