I just got back from holidays in Greece and enjoyed great new ways to access the Internet. My sister-in-law now has Net One which gave me wireless access in her Athens apartment. I followed the direction in this thread and with some improvising I had great success using Wind to access the web. GPRS speed is a little painful, but much better than no connection at all.
The local kiosk where I buy newspapers was out of Wind SIMs so I went to the nearby Wind store to buy a SIM and recharge card. It turned out to be one of the most complicated €8 transaction I can remember. If I had known, I would've tried other kiosks. Also, the recharge card can not be used until the SIM is activated by making at least 1 billable call. Calling customer support for €.12 is a cheap way to get activated.
I do not understand why I could not get Firefox or Thunderbird to work through a proxy when Internet Explorer V6 worked fine. Moving from page to page sometimes led to IE hanging. I had to close it frequently. Quite few websites could not be loaded at all. For example,
www.prepaidgsm.net was OK, but
www.prepaidgsm.net/forum/ led to attempts to “download the file” because the page was not recognized as a web page. I downloaded Opera and discovered that all my problem pages could be viewed by letting Opera fix it by reparsing as HTML.
I used my Sierra 875 card for access. Mine is a Cingular branded card commonly available unlocked on eBay for about $100. The WIND Connection Manager software could never find my card, so I used the Sierra 3G Watcher software. It was easy to create a profile for WIND N0N-Stop since all I had to specify was username, password, and access point name. The same Sierra software allows me to send and receive SMS messages at the same time I'm connected to the Internet.
Finally we have a way to browse the web and read email even while in mountains with no phone line available. Thanks to all for documenting this process.