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by kwccoin 2690 days ago
I wonder as many do not actually use the mobile phone as a phone and we have sometimes 1000 min free, can we use mobile phone as a kind of isp. It can connect to internet via calling?

Not sure any notebook with sim card can do as not sure they take call.

4 comments

You might be able to, but you won't be happy with the results -- cell phones use low bandwidth compression codecs, around 12kbs if I remember correctly, but for use as a modem, you'd be lucky to get half that or less.

Browsing the modern internet at 6kbs sounds painful.

Depends, GSM codec is indeed low bandwidth, G722.2 is not.
Even G722.2 is low bandwidth compared to speeds you'd want: to surf the internet at:

When used in mobile phone networks, there are three different configurations (combinations of bitrates) that may be used for voice channels:

    Configuration A (Config-WB-Code 0): 6.6, 8.85, and 12.65 kbit/s (Mandatory multi-rate configuration)
    Configuration B (Config-WB-Code 2): 6.6, 8.85, 12.65, and 15.85 kbit/s
    Configuration C (Config-WB-Code 4): 6.6, 8.85, 12.65, and 23.85 kbit/s*
Oh, I'm sorry, I had a different bandwidth in mind, the audio bandwidth.
Granted this was getting close to 20 years ago. I had a Motorola Timeport, for which I bought the PC connection kit. The PC connection kit just gave you a serial port. I was able to connect it to my PC and use the phone as a modem to dial my ISP. It just used my minutes and since I was on Sprint it was free after 7PM.

A couple of years later I bought one of the first smartphones. It was a Kyocera Palm Phone. On it I could use the native Palm PPP dialer and again it would use the phone as a modem and just use my minutes. It worked pretty well, though the Palm browser was lacking. I mostly just used it for email.

Most phones support bridge networking over bluetooth these days, but that uses your data. Some phones used to have an IR port for serial communications and bridged calling/modem access, but I'm not familiar with anything current.
On Android it's hard to receive/send voice data from a call to your own application