T-Mobile web'n'walk and firewall

MagicBoy

MagicBoy

MagicBoy

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
19,372
Location
South Manchester
I'm moving next week, and I've had web'n'walk activated on my mobile to give me some temporary internet access while I get an ADSL line etc sorted out. I'm used to hiding behind a firewall router at the moment and it just occured to me that I'll lose that protection when on the w'n'w. Do I need some sort of personal firewall installing? I'm using XP SP2 but I've no idea if the inbuild firewall is any good as I've never had to use it!

Any advice greatfully received...
 
It will be really slow.

Also, T-mobile run a transparent proxy (afaik), images are shrunk down to a smaller size before download, meaning that you'll have grainy images on your PC.

I really worried about being "hacked", the windows firewall should protect you from most inbound nastiness.

I would say however that I would check the T & C's of your WnW contract, as the basic one says that you are not allowed to use it as a modem. They could start cutting you off if you're surfing a lot. The odd web-page/checking e-mail will probably be fine though.
 
w'n'w has changed recently - there's now a £12.50 option that allows you to use your phone as a modem. It also gives you 3Gb/month rather than 1Gb/month. I'm on Friends and Family so it's half price - bargain!

Speedwise it's OK having been testing it for the last couple of days. My phone is a Sony Ericsson W810i which is GPRS + EDGE giving a theoretical 256Kb/sec. Annoyingly T-Mobile have not rolled out EDGE up here... So I was back to GPRS speeds which rival a 56k modem - not good. I've borrowed a spare 3G Nokia n70 from a (very nice) friend and it's now wonderful. Ran a couple of the ADSL speedtests and it comes back with 320-360Kb/sec. Couple the speed with the proxy and it's just like 1Mb broadband. If the proxy is a problem then a refresh (Ctrl-F5 in Firefox) gets the original image.
 
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