5. March 2009 by admin.

For my yachting customers I’m interested in ways to monitor the Internet data usage - especially in light of my recent blog post about the 5GB limit imposed by AT&T on their 3G Cellular Network.

In the web interface of the Ericsson W25 - Open your browser to your bookmark or favorite for the unit, or enter http://192.168.1.1 (or whatever is the configured IP Address of the unit.) Login as username: user, Password: user. Newer firmwares you may only have to enter the Password: user.

On the left side click on the tab for the “Internet” page. Just below the Link Status is a section with a heading TRAFFIC STATISTICS. This section has Transmitted and Received counters - and includes Transmitted and Received “Current Month” and “Previous Month”. This information can be useful in determining how much data traffic (Internet) you have used - and can help you to avoid going over the AT&T 5GB per month usage.

Note: I haven’t tested as to wether these counters survive a reboot or power cycle of an E W25 unit - so I’m seeking anyone that has one that can tell me if the totals remain the same after a power or manual reboot of the unit.

We’re always talking about Kilobytes (KB) and Megabytes (MB) and even Gigabytes (GB) when we’re talking about computer hard drives, memory, and things like 3G Data Transfer Totals - So what is this (KiB) thing that we’re seeing in the Ericsson W25?

Kibi’s Mebi’s and Gibi’s oh my! Lions and Tigers and Bears oh my! It’s worth having a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte to help us make sense of that. Basically manufacturers and such have helped make a mess of the terms by rounding things off to base-10 numbers, for example making Kilobytes = 1000 bytes and Megabytes = 1,000,000 bytes. Those nice round numbers are easier for humans to think about than the truth which is that a Kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes. So 1 Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes, and 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes. One could easily see how you could start loosing some bytes when you get to the bigger echelons like Mega and Giga. Or your total count can be off because of rounding off…

So Kibi, Mebi, and Gibi (oh my!) have come to the rescue to keep us on track. Newer Linux Operating System uses these terms - and so thus the Ericsson W25 does as well.

* Anyway - I’m looking for the answer to my question - Does the E W25 keep those statistic totals on the Internet Page beyond a reboot? or are they zeroed out?

I’m also at the understanding from E W25 documentation that the counters are reset before it ever reaches 5GB - reference the following manual excerp:

Note: The data size and packet counters have the upper limits of 4 GiB
and 2 to the 32nd power  packets (more than 4 billion packets). When these limits
have been reached, the counters wrap around to zero.

* Hopefully this can be a tool to help my yacht / boat customers (and others on land) keep track of their Kib, Mib, and Gib usage on their E W25 and keep them below the 5GB (GiB?) limit in place by AT&T. This along with periodically logging into your wireless.att.net account page and checking the usage - seem to be good ideas for NOW.

* Alan Spicer Marine Telecom is all about helping the customers to use Internet Access Technologies to save money on their Internet / Data bills - and to choose options (often multiple options) for the best savings at their particular current geographic location.

—

Alan Spicer Telecom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954 683 3426

Posted in Cellular Voice and Internet | No Comments »

5. March 2009 by admin.

A lot of owners/users of the Ericsson W25 are not aware that it can do some special things - besides the magic of providing Analog Telephone usage of Cellular Voice plans and 3G High Speed Internet. The E W25 can also be used to share USB memory sticks and external USB hard disk drives to the on board network (ethernet wired ports and wifi if you’ve got wifi on board connected.) This can be helpful if you have normally done that via a desktop computer or such and don’t want to leave that computer on 24/7.

Configure USB Services

The Ericsson W25 may function as a network storage device or printer server
for LAN/WLAN hosts using Windows File and Printer sharing (also known as
SMB or CIFS). 
It is possible to have two USB storage devices or one storage device and a
USB printer connected to the Ericsson W25 at the same time.
When an external hub is connected, the Ericsson W25 supports connection of
up to two storage devices and one printer at the same time.

File Sharing
USB disk drives or memory sticks that are connected to the Ericsson W25 are
automatically mounted and shared over the LAN (and WLAN, if enabled).

The included files are shared with all devices belonging to the same
workgroup on the LAN/WLAN and all users have full read/write (including
delete) access to the shared files.
Note: Only the first partition of the storage device will be automatically
mounted and shared through the smb service.

Printer Sharing
When a printer is connected to the USB port, the Ericsson W25 automatically
creates a local UNIX printer that is shared over the LAN (and WLAN, if
enabled) using SMB/CIFS protocol.
The smb service only performs protocol conversion between SMB/CIFS and
the local printer.

* Note: For my direct customers with E W25 units - If you need any help using the sharing services of the unit … please contact me. I have just done a printer on a S/Y sharing it via the built-in wifi of an E W25 - so I know that is a little tricky. You only need to do that if your printer isn’t already network aware (is not wireless or wired LAN capable) e.g. USB only printers.

Sharing hard drives and USB memory sticks is pretty easy, but you may still need a little help if you are not familiar with Windows Sharing. So my customers feel free to contact me if you need assistance with this stuff.

—

Alan Spicer Telecom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954 683 3426

Posted in Computer Networking onboard Sail and Motor Yachts | No Comments »

5. March 2009 by admin.

The following recommendation comes from the Administrators Guide for the Ericsson W25. It seems to indicate that Windows Vista (and Linux)computers don’t need this to be done.

Enable High Data Rates
Due to the relatively high latency of HSDPA it is necessary to tweak the
TCP/IP stack of the client to achieve maximum performance. The changes
that affect performance the most are enabling TCP Window Scaling and
Selective ACK support.
Most HSDPA PC Card drivers make these settings automatically, but with the
Ericsson W25 they have to be set manually.
Note: Windows Vista and recent versions of Linux kernels have automatic
window scaling enabled by default and should not need any TCP
tweaking.
These kinds of parameters are hidden in the Windows registry, but there are
some tools that give user friendly access to them, for example TCP Optimizer
http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
 and DrTCP
http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp
.  

The following settings are recommended to change:
TCP Receive Window = 146000
Selective ACK:s = Yes
Max Duplicate ACK:s = 2
RFC1323 TCP Window Scaling = Yes
Usually (on Windows) it takes more than one TCP session (download) to be
able to fully utilize the HSDPA bandwidth. This means that at least two parallel
TCP sessions should be used when testing maximum throughput.

—

Alan Spicer Telecom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954 683 3426

Posted in Cellular Voice and Internet | No Comments »