[peter_b]

I've read through a bunch of the posts on using the Blackberry as a modem for connecting to the Internet and I have that working great. What I'm looking for here is something a little different:

I would like to circumvent the absence of a modem in my laptop and use the BB tethered via BT to dial into routers that I manage. I can, of course, access them via SSH, but we still like to have the option of directly dialing into them in the event of a WAN failure at the remote site. I was in the process of looking for USB modems for my Mac when it occurred to me that I may be able to do what I want without needing to carry yet another piece of equipment.

I have my MBP and 8830 paired and I can see the BT port from zterm. However, when I attempt to initiate a dial-up connection, zterm fails as it doesn't detect a carrier. This isn't super-surprising as I'm relatively sure there won't ever be a dial tone, but I would think there would be an easy way to work around this.

On the same note: I also got thinking that maybe it can be used for outbound faxing. I don't have a need (or even desire) for it to receive inbound faxes, but it would be handy for it to handle the very occasional outbound fax. Trying to send a fax this way (using 10.5.1) results in a message saying that the fax is waiting for authentication. No indication of where it would want to be authenticated though.

Apologies if this has been documented or dicsussed elsewhere... I didn't have any luck finding anyone else with this admittedly niche issue.

Thanks in advance for any help.

-Peter

[peter_b]

From some additional searching that I've been doing, it doesn't look to promising regardless of OS. It seems that the carriers may have simply disabled the ability to call another number other than their Internet access number when in modem mode.

Fairly annoying, but not necessarily surprising.

If anyone comes up with any ideas or alternatives, I'd be much obliged if you share them with me.

-Peter

[digit323]

I would like the ability to RECEIVE FAXES via my BB onto my laptop (so using it as an external modem). I do not have a landline and do not get enough faxes to want to subscribe to eFax or similar services. (Not to mention the gunk their software has.)

I can currently use as a data modem tethered via USB or Bluetooth. Works great. But no luck sending or -- especially important for me -- receiving faxes. Anyone know how to make this happen.

(I did check out http://www.blackberryforums.com/blac...-laptop-8.html but did not see anything about using BB as an external fax modem in fax mode.)

Anyone?

Thanks.