tm wrote:
<completely extraneous stuff snipped>
> Oh, that. Yeah well, I have a cell phone. It seems to work okay...

Really, in the entire lengthy "reply" that was the only remotely relevant
comment. Sadly, that's about the level of topical relevance to be expected
in this newsgroup. However, the following second generation post was
prepared for another venue, so I guess this newsgroup can have the sloppy
thirds:

This post is actually based on a query to my ISP, but having taken the
trouble to collect all the notes, I'm still hoping someone around here may
find the information interesting or be able to add some useful feedback. I
was obviously hoping that this would have been resolved by now, but... I
feel like the more I learn the less I know, at least about these portable
phone things. I'm getting close to just throwing the entire wireless project
away...

First, a billing-related question that I had hoped to find answered on the
Asahi Net (AN) Web site (my ISP). I spent a long time wandering around
there, and so far I'm no wiser than before. It's not that I feel AN is
trying to make things more complicated than they are, but more like... Well,
to put it in the form of a joke. It's not that the service providers are
trying to design service options that are hard to understand. They are
apparently designing services that are impossible to understand. Actually,
at this point I'm not even sure of AN's standing there... AN offers some
services of its own, but in many places AN is just remarketing various
more-or-less complicated services from various other companies.

Specifically, Air Edge on their complicated service options menu has an
entry for a combined ADSL/mobile service that is apparently even cheaper
than their mobile-only service. This does not seem to make sense, and I
can't find any apparently related information on the AN Web site. Air Edge
says this service is compatible with e-Access and with AN, so that part
seems to be okay. However, I can't find any reverse link from the AN side,
and I can't understand why they (Air Edge? Air Edge with AN?) would offer
two services more cheaply than one service. The bottom line would appear to
be that I could switch to that option, keep my ADSL, and essentially have
the same portable phone service for an additional net charge around 1,000
yen/month more than for the ADSL alone. (That would be around 6,000
yen/month for the combined Internet/phone services (with part still going to
NTT) versus the previous 5,000-odd yen/month for ADSL versus the 5,000
yen/month for the mobile-only service from Air Edge.) I also asked AN to
clarify this, but my latest hypothesis is that the 4,000 yen/month is on top
of the other ADSL charges, which would actually mean that option is around
9,000 yen/month--which would seem to so totally unattractive that I can't
even understand the basis of the service offering.

Now for technical issues. The technical report is that the wireless-only
option is not working as well as I'd hoped, which may be another reason to
give up on this approach. The first and most serious problem is dropped
connections, but I don't think AN can help there, and Air Edge has so far
not been very helpful. The drops are random, and do not involve any movement
of the computer or movement of the phone at my end. The connection seems to
stay live, actually, but there are no more incoming packets. Sometimes I can
continue to send outgoing packets, and other times there is nothing--but in
all of these cases there is no indication at my end that the connection has
died. I've waited various lengths of time, but so far it seems to be an
irreversible state, and the only solution is to disconnect and reconnect.
(It happened again as I was writing this, but I still have my trusty ADSL to
reconnect with. I'm using the free utility NetMeter to monitor the true
state of the connection.)

Another problem is the annoying random probes from all over the Internet.
Yes, my firewall seems to be handling them, but it's the successful one that
the firewall doesn't catch that worries me--and of course I'd get no notice
in that case. There really is an advantage of having that dumb modem/router
in the loop. Kind of like attacking a stone wall. As I was typing this, I
got hit three times, most recently from 210.253.251.29, which is apparently
in the AN network, though I've had other visits this morning from places
like Greece and Mexico. And there's three more... (Yes, I know I can disable
those notifications, but right now I want to get a feel for how frequent and
how variable they are--most of them are just after ports 135, 445, 1433, and
the NetBIOS ports.)

The last problem (just now) is non-functional sites. Of course with the
smaller bandwidth I expected to lose streaming video, but there are lots of
other services these days that apparently just can't deal with dialup users.
Or is there something about the wireless connection that makes it different
from a regular dialup?

Any feedback or suggestions will be appreciated and considered, and I will
continue to study the issues and options.