Globe Trotter vs Vodaphone

mbur

I have a nice new acer aspire one with the on board 3G phone thingie.
It was purchased in the UK.
We have windows xp service pack 3 i believe.
We also have a Vodaphone (ireland) SIM and this give me three services
1) SMS which works,
2) a 'broadband' connection which I don't use and
3) a modem device which our client software can see but cannot use.
The modem device is called a 'Globe Trotter MO40x - Modem Interface'
I've tried testing the modem using hyperterminal but when I click the dial button
the system comes back with a 'No Answer' Status after about one second.
I tried manual dialing in a predial terminal window and got a 'NO CARRIER' response to my dialling command
So the modem is not making the call. I dial the same number on my mobile and the remote system answers.
Any clues as to what my problem is? vodaphone or globe trotter?
TIA mike

mbur

Like so many of these more esoteric 'can you help me threads' the mighty boards community has been totally useless here. I don't blame anyone for this and I will confess that posting here was a long shot. I knew that contacting Vodaphone was my best option. Have you ever tries to hold down a fulltime job and contact vodaphone? Well good luck with that. I was lucky enough to get cellulitis and a week off work to persue this matter. After failing to make contact by phone and email I managed to ellicit a response by starting a discussion topic on their faecebook page. (not a typo)

My friendly vodaphone respondent kindly suggested we should start by trying to get the internet up. To this end he supplied me with a username, password and ID to enter into the Acer 3G dashboard software. When this didn't work he steered me toward vodaphone's proprietary 3G dashboard which I downloaded and installed on the system. I was too lazy/afraid to uninstall the acer version but was smart enough to remove the acer 3G short-cut in the auto start folder. This was enough, and upon running the vodaphone dashboard I had 3G mobile internet up and running. Neat!

This connectivity did nothing for the globetrotter modem interface. I still could not dial up and connect my client's terminal emulation software to his remote system. Since this was all that we wanted I was back onto vodaphone only to be told that this rather old fashion way of doing things is not supported by vodaphone! It seems that data connection thru the internet is the only way we are encouraged to go these days.

Well never mind about that. I have an ageing bluetooth phone and a USB dongle that provide the necessary connection thru vodaphone's network so we will get the same for the client's acer, right! We will take the SIM out of the acer and put it into the phone yes!

This is what was done, but to cut a long story short, I can tell you that:

1) The newer bluetooth phones and dongles do not support the old style peer to peer dialup networking but the old ones do.

2) The best way to check a b/t dongle is to plug it in and hope it is compatable with the (now ageing) windows xp bluetooth stack. If your dongle needs it's proprietary stack, forget it. You will get a DUN modem (ie dial up to a TCPIP host) but no 'Standard modem over bluetooth', which is the peer to peer one.

Oh, and why do things the peer to peer way? Its still our cheapest way to get a mobile data connection.

cheeers