OT: GPRS anyone?

[Bob Edwards]

Somewhat off topic, but I know that most of you good people are right at
the forefront of new developments etc.

Anyone out there have any experience with General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)?

So far, my research has revealed that only Telstra and Optus are offering it
at this time, with Vodaphone (Australia) to have it soon (Vodaphone in many
European countries has had it for a while).

Optus seem to charge either 2.2c or 1.1c per Kb (which I take it means 1000
octets) for access to their own WAP servers, depending upon the day of week,
and 3.3c/Kb for access to the Internet at large (for those of you worrying
about download costs etc. that works out to $33,000/Gb for internet access or
about $22,000 per RedHat ISO image downloaded - mind you, it will take two
weeks to get the download done!).

Telstra seem to charge 2.2c/kb for the first 200k ($4.40 worth) then drop down
to 1.1c/kb from then on until you start a new session, which you may not need
to do more than once a day or so. This charge seems to be independent of
access
to their own WAP servers, or the Internet at large.

So, that makes the Telstra plan look a whole lot more attractive than the
Optus one, or am I missing something?

Clearly, using this sort of wireless technology is a great driver for good
compression systems any mechanisms like rproxy (the Rsync Web proxy protocol/
daemon).

Also, what phones are people using? I'm wanting one with BlueTooth as well,
but it seems the only one with GPRS and BlueTooth is the Ericcson T39, but
this phone appears to get a bad rap on reliability and robustness. Can anyone
comment who has one? Anyone got it all to work under Linux yet?

Sorry about the sort of Off Topic nature of this posting.

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.