[spblat]

Originally Posted by sgtcasey

Just to make sure I understand this right (so I can pass this information along to other folks), but you were having UMA call issues until you added the APN on your phone?

Dave

Yes. Here's a summary of my state before the fix:

• Phone is in UMA mode
• Upgraded from 8700
• Corporate BES user
• Can send and receive calls, but within a few seconds it always reverts back to GSM/EDGE, and there's always a several-second dropout in the meantime
• If I disable GSM/EDGE and stick with UMA, I get many dropped calls, and lots of audio dropouts, making the phone useless
• Wifi performance is nowhere near what I expected

The theory (which I think is true) is that my UMA traffic was routing from my wifi through my corporation's BES server and all my company's routers, filters, packet shapers and who knows what else. The theory further goes that adding the APN forced this traffic to use public routers on the way to T-Mobile.

Also note that to get improved Wifi performance, I had to use rivviepop's suggestion just above, to force the browser to rely on a true wifi connection. Otherwise, my wifi browsing traffic was going through my company's infrastructure, and that is something I was able to prove with checkmyip.

[sgtcasey]

edit

[kingsfan3344]

Thanks for the above info. I "forced" the wifi connection, checked the ip, which was the same as my desktop, also had apn set already, UMA has been working fine, did a battery pull but my wifi (with optimal network conditions) is still slower than EDGE. Any recommendations? Thanks. (I am also on a BES with exchangemymail)

[tdawg00]

I think alot of people are forgetting that on EDGE you are getting alot compression from the BB servers, with wifi its the raw data being converted. compression makes alot things go faster

[spblat]

Yes. I think there's a CPU bottleneck as well: loading a big page with lots of images takes some rendering time. I can load MP3 and video files at up to 700 kbps, but I rarely see spikes over 300kbps when downloading web pages.

[rivviepop]

Originally Posted by tdawg00

I think alot of people are forgetting that on EDGE you are getting alot compression from the BB servers, with wifi its the raw data being converted. compression makes alot things go faster

I just stuck a simple PHP script on my home apache, the BB devices accept gzip and deflate compression surprisingly. Here are the interesting bits:

HTTP_HOST
192.168.1.100

HTTP_CONNECTION
keep-alive

HTTP_USER_AGENT
BlackBerry8320/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100

HTTP_ACCEPT
text/html,
application/xhtml+xml,
application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml,
application/vnd.wap.wmlc;q=0.9,
application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc;q=0.7,
text/vnd.wap.wml;q=0.7,
text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor,*/*;q=0.5

HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET
ISO-8859-1,
UTF-8,
US-ASCII,
UTF-16BE,
windows-1252,
UTF-16LE,
windows-1250

HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE
en-US,en;q=0.5

HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING
gzip,deflate

HTTP_X_WAP_PROFILE
"http://www.blackberry.net/go/mobile/profiles/uaprof/8320/4.2.2.rdf"

If you have a modern Apache >=2.0.45, you can ensure your gzip/deflate is active with a logic block like the following:

  DeflateCompressionLevel 6
  <Location />
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|swf|zip)$ no-gzip dont-vary
    Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
  </Location>

[lxblackout2o3xl]

so basically just reset the Curve, enter the wap settings (wap.voicestream.com), pull battery, and voila, it should work as it should? I only get 1-2 bars whether near my router or up two floors and even up two floors it stays for a few seconds then switches back over to EDGE ...
can someone confirm this method?^^

[spblat]

Seems to have worked for me. I have my Curve set to prefer wifi, and a) calls stay on UMA even with one bar of reception, and b) transition to EDGE when I walk up my street is seamless.

[lxblackout2o3xl]

I shall try this in a little bit then. Thanks!

[lxblackout2o3xl]

Still same weak UMA signal in my room :(
Must be the router or it could be the phone.

[spblat]

There's still something wrong. Here's a bandwidth profile downloading an MP3 from a local server inside my LAN. This periodicity is exactly the same thing I saw during failed UMA calls, but UMA seems to be doing OK.

Grunt, grumble. Any other suggestions?

[njguy]

too many issues?

[spblat]

Originally Posted by njguy

too many issues?

Yes. Now I'm fighting with Comcast 'cause I see lots of dropped packets on one of the routers between me and the intertubes...but that doesn't explain my latest bb wifi issue.

[spblat]

This is on again, off again. Today I'm on again. I have been on a conference call for the last 90 minutes. The first 60 minutes were through my home router over UMA. Then I left the house to take my son to school. Transfer to EDGE was flawless. Now I'm back and transferred flawlessly back to UMA. And just to push my luck, I opened the browser during the call and downloaded an MP3 off the internet at 43 KB per second.

[sgtcasey]

edit

[spblat]

Originally Posted by sgtcasey

Glad it seems to be working now. Did Comcast get their issues sorted out?

Dave

Seems so. They found a couple of corroded connectors, but before they did that they proved that the connection from my house to their plant was bulletproof, 20Mbps, no dropped packets. So it's the same old "I'm a cable customer, and my network performance is inversely proportional to the activities of my neighbors" story. :-/