Nirenjan’s Space

As my living in USA series continues, I bring to you the perils of bringing a mobile handset from India.

First of all, a brief background on the technology behind GSM. The simplest way to put it is that your mobile handset is a glorified two-way radio. As you would use a radio to listen to an FM channel on a particular frequency, your mobile phone also listens on a specific frequency (to be precise, a set of frequencies). The GSM standard has allocated 4 bands worldwide, namely the 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 1900 MHz bands. All operators in India use the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands, while operators in the US use the 850 MHz and 1900 MHz bands. GSM World has some good information regarding the usage of the bands and coverage sorted by operator.

From my perspective, if you are going anywhere on the east coast or in Silicon Valley, you are well off with a decent tri-band phone like the Nokia 6681. Basically, you want to make sure that your phone supports the 1900 MHz band also, since a lot of operators here seem to use that particular band. You are even better off with a quad-band phone. One such phone is the Sony Ericsson W300i.

It is possible to get a phone here. Operators usually bundle a phone free of charge when you buy a plan. Or you can get a phone of your choice, at a discounted rate. The disadvantages that I see with this model are as follows:

• Your phone is tied to the operator. You cannot take your phone from, say AT&T and use it on T-Mobile. This is because there is something called a network lock that is placed on the phone, and usually only the operator can deactivate the lock. However, there exist sites where you can get the phone unlocked, usually for a fee.
• You are tied into a contract for a specified period of time, usually one or two years. If you decide to terminate your contract, you have to pay an early termination fee. From the point of view of the operator, this is normal, since they subsidize the costs of the phone and recover those by having a two year plan or whatever.
• If you are going to be in the US for only a short trip, it is usually not worth getting into a contract. However, there are some pre-paid plans, although I have seen it is not as popular as it is in India. Post-paid is usually the way to go.

I hope this should be enough information for you to make a choice.

It’s been quite a while since BSNL brought out their 2 Mbps broadband service, and it looks good… however, there is one major drawback that I’ve noticed and it’s not with the service, it’s with the modem that they have provided.

I have a Huawei modem (WA1003A, I think…) which has Wi-Fi capability (supposedly). My home network is primarily wired with my laptop on wireless. That’s where the problem arises - the wireless functionality of this modem is totally hopeless. The only saving grace is that the wired part functions without any trouble.

Thankfully, I have a NetGEAR wireless router which I bought about a year ago to use when the old modem was around (that didn’t have wireless). Reconfigure the router, wire it to the LAN, and Hey, presto! Wireless capability is upto maximum.

I picked up a Hitachi 80 GB 2.5″ hard disk for my Thinkpad R51 laptop. The only problem - my laptop doesn’t recognize the disk. On the other hand, it does work beautifully with the USB enclosure that I bought to keep the old 40 GB disk in…

The laptop is a 2887-NQ7 model. So now, my questions to the world.

1. Do you have any idea of what problem could cause the laptop to not recognize the disk, and if so, how to fix it?
2. Is there a way to install Linux on the external USB disk, and to boot from the disk at powerup?

Update: I think I should have made this point more clear. I tried to replace the primary hard disk (40 GB) with the new one (80 GB). But the laptop does not detect the 80 GB disk in the IDE bay. However, it has no problems when I installed it in the USB drive case.

As a self proclaimed techno-geek, I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting technologies, primarily via Slashdot.

This morning, I found an article to a new chip that promises to drastically cut the power requirements of wireless devices such as cellphones and Wi-Fi laptops.

See the article here