Technology

Well, after my 6310i and 3Com bluetooth card decided spontaneously yesterday that they'd pair happily and, it seems, reliably (after several days of concentrated screaming, and after precisely zero driver or phone SIM updates), today we have an indication of the stability and performance of Orange GPRS.

After an hour or so of reliable connection this morning, I'm down to an MTBF of around one minute, that's when the damned thing connects at all. Orange (once I got through to them) tell me that there's maintenance going on on various cells resulting in reduced performance. No sher.

It seems that GPRS tags onto the arse end of voice bandwidth and is the first thing to go if capacity gets tight or base stations go suboptimal. I can live with that, I suppose, but it looks like connections die altgether instead of just transiently getting a pathologically reduced bitrate (which I could live with).

Doesn't even come back automagically; I have to fire up the not-really-DUN connection, trype the BT key into both ends, run a script to sort out my routing and finally reconnect my app. Oh, and watch the connection drop again before this process is even complete.

Ho hum.

...and

LiveLizard still hasn't been patched to cope with the API changes in Moz 1.1 (and NS7). I'd do it myself, but I don't have the time/brainpower to take on learning XUL and whatever else I'd need to pick up ATM.

And my GPRS connection has just died. Again.