Accessing Three's Intranet on a PC via Handset

[Hands0n]

I got bored this evening and dug out Mobile Phone Tools (MPT) and USB cable (supplied with an A835) and installed it to my desktop PC. I activated Liveupdate and after having to re-boot four times (yes, part of its install process) I finally got to the point where I was ready to plug the phone in.

As the A835 is only my plaything with a now-unfunded Threepay USIM I needed a working phone and so I pressed my contract E1000 into service for this experiment. I was impressed that the MPT Liveupdate has incorporated the appropriate "skin" - as a facsimile of the E1000 appeared on my PC screen.

MPT works a treat to admin the phone. I copied discrete entries from my Outlook contacts into the phone and tidied up my phone's incumbent entries. I even sent an SMS from MPT via the phone to elsewhere. I also did a full backup of the phone's contacts to a CSV file (compatible with Excel and the like).

Racing ahead to the actual point of this posting ....!! I started to wonder if I could get the Internet connectivity going and see what I could find out there. This is very easily achieved using MPT's configurator which creates a "dial up" connection to "3" - basically along the lines of a standard GPRS setup (APN details and all that kind of stuff).

Double-clicking the new connection resulted in some activity and notification that I was now connected to Three's data network. I ran up IE and tried a few standard web pages (i.e. Google and Three.co.uk) but none of these worked. So, turning to the E1000's browser config in the phone itself I copied it's default URL into IE and "hey presto!" I got the standard opening web page as you see it when you press the phone's Triangle button. I mouse clicked on "Services" and got the full Services page. I was able to surf to "My Three" and see how much of my allocated mins and content I'd used up this month. Basically I could do pretty much in IE all that I can on the phone's browser. It would not, however, let me access pages that had content - I guess there's more going on under the hood than the PC/IE combination would allow. Three's website definitely knew I was not using the handset!!

The claimed network speed reported by windows was 115Kbps - I'm presuming that is downstream. Three are using the 10.0.0.0 network, which leaves them one or two IP addresses to play around with.

It is a pity that I could not access other parts of their website to read their free content, for example News and Weather. The site did not seem to want to allow me to get very much further than I had.

Still, it was an interesting bit of a play around and a complete doddle to get working. This bodes well for the future, if or when Three open up to the Internet or other data services.

I've attached a JPG of part of the browser screen capture - the URL is clearly identifiable.

[miffed]

Originally Posted by Hands0n

The claimed network speed reported by windows was 115Kbps - I'm presuming that is downstream. Three are using the 10.0.0.0 network, which leaves them one or two IP addresses to play around with.

I beleive this is some kind of Windows Bug ! (please someone correct me if i'm wrong )
For some reason it reports the speed of some forms of modem at 115.2k bps no matter what speed the connection - I looked into it back when I had a Nokia Card Phone 2 , as I was well impressed when I saw I was connected at that kind of speed on normal 9.6kbps dial up !
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can explain why this happens ?

[Hands0n]

iirc - the reported speed is the "serial interface" speed betwixt modem and PC rather than the true WAN connection speed. The "speed" is defined in the Connection Properties dialogue box in Modem Settings and that is the one that is reported. Gah! I should have remembered that Next pass I'll try and find out what the true WAN speed is.

[Ben]

Great post - seeing the Three area displayed in a web browser like that is just weird! Is there nothing useful accessible at all? Otherwise we could set up a 'free' tunnel to Three's LAN, lol. I'm sure they'd love that!

[Hands0n]

Thanks It is rather tantalising, a nibble but not the full cake!!

I won't get another chance to play at this until over the weekend but I will be giving it a go to see what content pages I can drill down to other than "My Three" I'm wondering if I should not at least be able to hit the News and Weather sub-pages as they are text only.

[Ben]

I've just moderated your attachment pic - it should be viewable to all now. Sorry for the delay!