Greece GPRS? - Page 2

Christo Kid · 20-06-2007, 23:00

Hi there,
Reading your post you sound very knowledgeable, whereas I on the other hand am not and know next to nothing on this topic. I'm coming to Greece June 30 for a month and want to bring my laptop to stay connected with work.
I feel totally lost as what I have to do to get the internet going. I know you explained it in detail above but I was hoping you could answer a few questions and provide any other helpful info.
Do I have to buy a cell phone to connect and if yes what kind do I have to buy? I only plan to go to Greece every 2 years so I don't need a cell with all the bells and whistles but something that will work well. Can I use a house line to connect? I will be in Markopoulo, Porto Rafti and Crete, Hania. Do you know if they have coverage there.
What is Opera mini? I'm not sure if I need it. You mention the cost is 3,49 Euro per month. If I'm using a cell phone line is there air time charge as well. Once again not sure how that works. Do I need to download anything on my computer before I come?
Sorry if these questions sound dumb but I'm just trying to learn as much as I can so I don't bring my laptop all that way for nothing.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

gmmour · 22-06-2007, 01:29

Hi there!
Basically you do need a cellphone that can be connected to your computer and function as a modem. So try to find the cheapest phone that does that, probably all phones will do that.
If you want 3G speeds (300K) you have to buy a 3G phone. Cheapest one will cost you some 120 Euro (Samsung Z150 is a very good deal for a 3G phone). http://www.e-cosmote.gr/cosmote/esho...ategoryId=null

Markopoulo and Porto Rafti (and whole of the Athens Metropolitan Area) is covered with 3G by WIND which offers the above mentioned service. The same for the city of Chania in Crete. You can find their 3G coverage on their site www.wind.com.gr under "Coverage".

3,49 is a flat rate for data and you won't pay anything more provided that you always use the gwap.b-online.gr access point and proxy servers on your laptop's WAP settings. You'll pay for any minutes you talk on your phone, but if you use the above mentioned (Wind plus non-stop) offer, you will only be charged 3,49 Euro per month for any data usage...

Now if you buy a mobile phone you will probably also get a connection cable and a CD-ROM with the appropriate programs to connect your phone to your laptop and go online.

As far as fixed lines are concerned now, you can always use these either with ADSL (if the houses where you go do have ADSL which is a long-term service so you can't activate it just for yourself if the owners of the house don't want it because it requires a one year contract, although it actually costs a mere 10 Euro per month for 24 Mbps and takes about a month to activate so you have to see into that before you come to Greece) or you can use them for dialup connections with speeds up to 56K (that's ooooold and slooooow but always works fine for email and a little occasional browsing) paying something like 2 eurocents per minute using any of the "Free" dialup services. For example you can use "Tellas Free internet", using 8015005000 as your dialup number, and the word "tellas" as the username and the password. www.free-internet.gr

Now if you use a mobile phone with a WIND SIM card (prepaid or postpaid) and the WIND PLUS NON-STOP option, you will get unlimited surfing for one month with 3,49 flat rate. The speeds will be about 64K on 2G network (nationwide) or up to 300K on the 3G network (your places of interest are covered) or even up to 3,6 Mbps if you have an HSDPA-enabled 3G mobile phone (which are quite expensive)... Note though, that the WIND PLUS non-stop servers actually pose a 1MB size limit per file you download while surfing on the flat-rate tariff! So this tariff is best suited for email, chat and web browsing but not for downloading large files and large attachments (larger than 1MB)...

Opera Mini is a java web browser that can be installed on any mobile phone that supports java applications and with that you can surf the internet on your mobile. It's quite useful when you're out and about without any access to a computer and want to surf the web or check some web-based email on the go.

Besides that, if you live close to someone who is stupid enough to have their home Wifi connection unlocked (quite usual nowadays) you can always "steal" some of their high-speed bandwidth and you can always surf on public WiFi hotspots at sea-ports, airports, hotels and cafes (like Starbucks). And in emergencies, you can use any fixed line for dialup!

So bring your laptop with you. Buy an inexpensive phone that can connect to your laptop and function as a GPRS (or even better as a 3G) modem. Get a WIND prepaid SIM from any tobacco kiosk in Greece, pop it in to your new mobile, connect the mobile to your laptop through the provided cable and software, do the appropriate settings for WIND PLUS (APN access point and proxy servers as mentioned above), activate the WIND PLUS NON-STOP offer by sending the sms to the number I mentioned above, and you're ready to go!
And if for any reason this doesn't work you can always use the fixed line at the house you're staying to go online with dialup (2 eurocenta per minute and the outdated speed of 56Kbps) or go to a place where a public WiFi hotspot is available -provided that your laptop has a wifi card- and go online from there!

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 · 20-03-2008, 16:58

I don't know anybody who has the Internet Tablet, but since you're "tethering" through a phone, I don't think it will be a problem... The phone handles the proxy but still (as my experience with tethering to a PC shows) you might have to do some settings on the browser too and that might me the tricky part...

I suggest you ask Nokia people about that, you won't really find a lot of Greek users with the N810 and using wind plus... Most of them are using it with a mobile and with a laptop...

petkow · 20-03-2008, 18:46

I have the older version (Nokia 770) and on mine it is possible to set the proxy in the browser so I should think it will be the same with yours too. The proxy cannot be setup in any browser options. Instead in my case I found it in the 'Advanced settings' of the 'Connection Settings' of a chosen connection in the 'Connection manager'. There is an option there to enter the HTTP proxy and port number etc. Took me ages to find it but all works well now.

I am no expert, so for further help it will probably be best if you ask the serious Maemo geeks on www.internettablettalk.com

petkow · 20-03-2008, 18:50

Oops... crossed message. I see you found the proxy settings! Have you never managed to connect it through a phone to the internet? I usually find a wifi signal but when not I regularly browse and check emails etc. on the N770 through the GPRS on my phone. Works well!

DaveRo · 20-03-2008, 20:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by petkow

Have you never managed to connect it through a phone to the internet?

I haven't tried because I'm at home in the UK and I don't want to spend £5/Mb on Virgin experimenting. I'll be in Italy in April using Wind a Mega deal, so I set the phone up for that (very easy: select Italy, Select Wind, done!) which is when I found the proxy settings.

From there Corfu and the Ionian. It looks as if it'll be mainly GPRS - not much 3G I think.

gmmour · 21-03-2008, 01:01

The http-mangling, unfortunately is a browser problem, so it depends on the Tablet's browser and the way it handles errors... What happens actually in Opera is that you get an XML error message prompting you to click on a link for the browser to parse it as HTML. I don't know why, but some pages (especially PHP and forums) are falsely parsed as XML by Opera when tethered to a phone with the Wind Plus access point, maybe it has to do with the transparent proxy they use on this access point... Good luck! (It was impossible for a browser not to have proxy settings, but it seems did a great job with the Tablet's GUI hiding all the Settings under incomprehensible menus... That's what phone manufacturers do all the time)

	(#1)
Christo Kid (Offline) Junior Member Newbie Posts: 1 Join Date: 20 Jun 2007 Country:	20-06-2007, 23:00 Hi there, Reading your post you sound very knowledgeable, whereas I on the other hand am not and know next to nothing on this topic. I'm coming to Greece June 30 for a month and want to bring my laptop to stay connected with work. I feel totally lost as what I have to do to get the internet going. I know you explained it in detail above but I was hoping you could answer a few questions and provide any other helpful info. Do I have to buy a cell phone to connect and if yes what kind do I have to buy? I only plan to go to Greece every 2 years so I don't need a cell with all the bells and whistles but something that will work well. Can I use a house line to connect? I will be in Markopoulo, Porto Rafti and Crete, Hania. Do you know if they have coverage there. What is Opera mini? I'm not sure if I need it. You mention the cost is 3,49 Euro per month. If I'm using a cell phone line is there air time charge as well. Once again not sure how that works. Do I need to download anything on my computer before I come? Sorry if these questions sound dumb but I'm just trying to learn as much as I can so I don't bring my laptop all that way for nothing. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

	(#2)
gmmour (Offline) Member Advanced Member Posts: 92 Join Date: 03 Oct 2006 Country:	22-06-2007, 01:29 Hi there! Basically you do need a cellphone that can be connected to your computer and function as a modem. So try to find the cheapest phone that does that, probably all phones will do that. If you want 3G speeds (300K) you have to buy a 3G phone. Cheapest one will cost you some 120 Euro (Samsung Z150 is a very good deal for a 3G phone). http://www.e-cosmote.gr/cosmote/esho...ategoryId=null Markopoulo and Porto Rafti (and whole of the Athens Metropolitan Area) is covered with 3G by WIND which offers the above mentioned service. The same for the city of Chania in Crete. You can find their 3G coverage on their site www.wind.com.gr under "Coverage". 3,49 is a flat rate for data and you won't pay anything more provided that you always use the gwap.b-online.gr access point and proxy servers on your laptop's WAP settings. You'll pay for any minutes you talk on your phone, but if you use the above mentioned (Wind plus non-stop) offer, you will only be charged 3,49 Euro per month for any data usage... Now if you buy a mobile phone you will probably also get a connection cable and a CD-ROM with the appropriate programs to connect your phone to your laptop and go online. As far as fixed lines are concerned now, you can always use these either with ADSL (if the houses where you go do have ADSL which is a long-term service so you can't activate it just for yourself if the owners of the house don't want it because it requires a one year contract, although it actually costs a mere 10 Euro per month for 24 Mbps and takes about a month to activate so you have to see into that before you come to Greece) or you can use them for dialup connections with speeds up to 56K (that's ooooold and slooooow but always works fine for email and a little occasional browsing) paying something like 2 eurocents per minute using any of the "Free" dialup services. For example you can use "Tellas Free internet", using 8015005000 as your dialup number, and the word "tellas" as the username and the password. www.free-internet.gr Now if you use a mobile phone with a WIND SIM card (prepaid or postpaid) and the WIND PLUS NON-STOP option, you will get unlimited surfing for one month with 3,49 flat rate. The speeds will be about 64K on 2G network (nationwide) or up to 300K on the 3G network (your places of interest are covered) or even up to 3,6 Mbps if you have an HSDPA-enabled 3G mobile phone (which are quite expensive)... Note though, that the WIND PLUS non-stop servers actually pose a 1MB size limit per file you download while surfing on the flat-rate tariff! So this tariff is best suited for email, chat and web browsing but not for downloading large files and large attachments (larger than 1MB)... Opera Mini is a java web browser that can be installed on any mobile phone that supports java applications and with that you can surf the internet on your mobile. It's quite useful when you're out and about without any access to a computer and want to surf the web or check some web-based email on the go. Besides that, if you live close to someone who is stupid enough to have their home Wifi connection unlocked (quite usual nowadays) you can always "steal" some of their high-speed bandwidth and you can always surf on public WiFi hotspots at sea-ports, airports, hotels and cafes (like Starbucks). And in emergencies, you can use any fixed line for dialup! So bring your laptop with you. Buy an inexpensive phone that can connect to your laptop and function as a GPRS (or even better as a 3G) modem. Get a WIND prepaid SIM from any tobacco kiosk in Greece, pop it in to your new mobile, connect the mobile to your laptop through the provided cable and software, do the appropriate settings for WIND PLUS (APN access point and proxy servers as mentioned above), activate the WIND PLUS NON-STOP offer by sending the sms to the number I mentioned above, and you're ready to go! And if for any reason this doesn't work you can always use the fixed line at the house you're staying to go online with dialup (2 eurocenta per minute and the outdated speed of 56Kbps) or go to a place where a public WiFi hotspot is available -provided that your laptop has a wifi card- and go online from there!

	(#3)
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

	(#4)
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!

	(#6)
gmmour (Offline) Member Advanced Member Posts: 92 Join Date: 03 Oct 2006 Country:	20-03-2008, 16:58 I don't know anybody who has the Internet Tablet, but since you're "tethering" through a phone, I don't think it will be a problem... The phone handles the proxy but still (as my experience with tethering to a PC shows) you might have to do some settings on the browser too and that might me the tricky part... I suggest you ask Nokia people about that, you won't really find a lot of Greek users with the N810 and using wind plus... Most of them are using it with a mobile and with a laptop...

	(#7)
petkow (Offline) Senior Member Prepaid Pioneer Posts: 696 Join Date: 01 Aug 2006 Location: Madrid Country:	20-03-2008, 18:46 I have the older version (Nokia 770) and on mine it is possible to set the proxy in the browser so I should think it will be the same with yours too. The proxy cannot be setup in any browser options. Instead in my case I found it in the 'Advanced settings' of the 'Connection Settings' of a chosen connection in the 'Connection manager'. There is an option there to enter the HTTP proxy and port number etc. Took me ages to find it but all works well now. I am no expert, so for further help it will probably be best if you ask the serious Maemo geeks on www.internettablettalk.com

	(#8)
petkow (Offline) Senior Member Prepaid Pioneer Posts: 696 Join Date: 01 Aug 2006 Location: Madrid Country:	20-03-2008, 18:50 Oops... crossed message. I see you found the proxy settings! Have you never managed to connect it through a phone to the internet? I usually find a wifi signal but when not I regularly browse and check emails etc. on the N770 through the GPRS on my phone. Works well!

	(#10)
gmmour (Offline) Member Advanced Member Posts: 92 Join Date: 03 Oct 2006 Country:	21-03-2008, 01:01 The http-mangling, unfortunately is a browser problem, so it depends on the Tablet's browser and the way it handles errors... What happens actually in Opera is that you get an XML error message prompting you to click on a link for the browser to parse it as HTML. I don't know why, but some pages (especially PHP and forums) are falsely parsed as XML by Opera when tethered to a phone with the Wind Plus access point, maybe it has to do with the transparent proxy they use on this access point... Good luck! (It was impossible for a browser not to have proxy settings, but it seems did a great job with the Tablet's GUI hiding all the Settings under incomprehensible menus... That's what phone manufacturers do all the time)