i won’t recommend starone anymore

i’ve been using starone from indosat for my internet connection at home for about a year. i chose them because they offer a package which is affordable for me, the cheapest that i could find :). i have to pay 99.000 rupiah a month for maximum 1 Gig of usage. if i use more than that, they’ll charge me 300 rupiah per Meg. i usually pay around 100.000 to 125.000 rupiah a month.

at first i was quite satisfied with the connection, i could browse the internet and login to remote server comfortably. and everytime i meet a friend, i always recommend them to use starone too. it’s cheap and fast enaugh. but starting about a couple of months ago, i don’t remember exactly, i feel the connection is no longer stable. on certain period of time the connection is very slow, it’s no longer comfortable to browse the internet. but it was still tolerable because it happened only for a while, an hour or so.

but lately it’s getting worst, i can’t open even a single page, and it happen for hours. like yesterday for example. i had been online for about 2 hours and then around 3 pm i felt the connection was slow, some pages couldn’t get loaded completely, so i decided to go offline. at the evening my wife started to get online about 8 pm, 30 minutes later she complained because the connection was slow. so she went offline. about 9 pm i started to get online, i could not open a single page. i was very upset.

this thought about stop recommending starone has been on my mind for the last few days…… i finally put it on my blog so people would think at least twice before applying for starone.

here are some tests i did to test the connection lastnight. because i couldn’t open speedtest.net page at all, i login by ssh to a remote server (very slow to connect) and tried to download a file to see how the speed was. here’s my first capture (look at the transfer rate, it’s only 0,1 KB/sec) :

about an hour later the capture turned like this (no progress, transfer rate is now 0,0KB/sec) :

so from now on i would recommend “please think twice before you apply for starone”
look at the ping capture above, very unstable connection, wasting my time….. :((

Nokia 3155 usb modem problem

Nokia 3155i is a CDMA cellphone i use to connect to the internet at home. it’s attached to a PC which is a gateway for others to the internet. the driver for the nokia usb modem is taken from PC Suite 6.81.13.0 which works fine from the first time of installation.

so if i want to browse the net from a laptop, i have to turn on the PC gateway even though i will not use it. it’s not a problem when my wife is at home and working on the PC. but when she’s not…. it’s a waste of power
so today i tried to connect the cellphone to the laptop (compaq presario 2500) so that i could browse the net without the need to turn on the gateway PC. i installed a newer PC Suite (Nokia_PC_Suite_rel_6_86_9_0_eng_web.exe) on the laptop just to get the driver for the cellphone modem. after the installation, i set up a dial-up connection by running the wizard. the set up completed and i tried to dial….. but it failed it said the connection was terminated by the remote computer….
i did some check… everything looked good…. the cellphone was not connected to the PC Suite. normally the connection attempt will fail if the cellphone is connected to PC Suite.

my friend happened to call me for some solutions about a problem at the office……..he’s got a lot of experience about connecting a computer to the internet using a cellphone……. so i asked him what i had missed in my settings…. he suggest to add AT+CRM=1 on the modem’s advanced settings. i did what he told but still no luck.
i was then uninstall the PC Suite, asked google using the PC gateway and download Nokia_Connectivity_Cable_Driver_rel_6_86_11_0_eng.msi from somewhere. installed the file, and set up a new connection again on the laptop. No luck…….

i had a hunch that the problem was with the driver…. it’s newer but it’s no good…. so i searched the net again with google to find the same PC Suite as the one installed on the PC gateway. i finally found the nokia 3155 modem driver here
it’s quiet big… about 17 Mb
after the download finished, i uninstalled the Nokia Conectivity Cable Driver and installed the downloaded PC Suite file, set up a new connection again on the laptop, tried to connect…. and finally it was successful