This is one of those techie stuff that anyone set up with a little help. Just follow the directions below. For purposes of illustration the systems I have used here is the windows 7 laptop with a pre-installed bluetooth device and Nokia N78. Again any bluetooth enabled cellphone would work similarly. You may not even need to install the cellphone software in the computer to get this to work. If you have any problem drop me a line on the comment column.
To use the bluetooth enabled cellphone or smartphone as a modem to connect a computer to the Internet. The modem over bluetooth wireless connection between the phone and your computer can be made using Bluetooth® technology as follows:
Step 1 – Make sure your phone bluetooth is discoverable
- Press the menu button
- Go to tools
- select bluetooth
- Make sure bluetooth is on and “my phone’s visibility” is set to “Shown to all”.
- Note the name of “My phone’s name”
- Exit
Step 2 – Set up the bluetooth connection
- Select start>all programs>bluetooth>bluetooth settings
- Add new network connection. If your device is not present select refresh or repeat step1 above. Select Next>
- If passkey is required enter any four numbers and repeat the same four numbers in Nokia N78 when asked. When connection is accepted the following screen will appear.
- Click Advanced modem settings and enter the following extra initialization settings. This is for South Africa: at+cgdcont=1”ip”,”your internet apn”,””,0,0
- Your internet apn for virgin mobile South Africa is vdata. Select Next>
- The network profile screen appears. Enter your internet apn as the connection name, enter *99***#1 as the dial up telephone number.
- Check “set connection as default”. Leave the name and password fields blank.
- Select finish.
Step 3 - Dial your connection and happy browsing
- Select the network connections icon
on your notification area>Select your connection>connect>dial (no username and password) - Go to your browser you are connected to the internet.
Virgin Mobile is great for prepaid. Good connection speed on EDGE with mostly 50-99% signal strength across the board. My usage at the moment is at 279.4mb/month. On other South African networks that gives me at least R558 on prepaid per month. But with Virgin Mobile I pay just about R140 for the same amount of data. And this is prepaid – no contracts, if I do not use anything I do not pay a cent. Mind you about half of that 279mb/month goes to updates (especially Norton live updates).
