Ode on a Wireless Card
October 9th, 2004Since moving back from Beijing I’ve missed several things. The food, for one. Another frequent hunger has been for the wireless Internet service I had in China.
What I had in China was not “hotspot”-dependent WI-FI access. Nor was it the short leash provided through Bluetooth protocols. It was rather GPRS access–access through a mobile telephony network.
To get it I just bought a card at the Bai Nao Hui computer market near Lan Dao shopping center, put that card in my laptop and signed up for the service with China Mobile, which was easy once I got to an actual China Mobile office rather than the counter of some uninfomred reseller of SIM cards. Once it was set up, I could surf from anywhere in China that had China Mobile signal, which is to say virtually everywhere.
I just loved it. I surfed from a succession of hotel rooms, apartments and office buildings in Beijing. I surfed on trains going through rural Shandong province. I surfed from the Peace Hotel in Shanghai (the original, smaller site, across Nanjing Road from the one where the jazz band now performs). I surfed in several of China’s many Starbucks (say what you will about cultural imperialism, but Starbucks doesn’t allow customers to smoke, and while I enjoy sipping a paomo bing hong cha at local tea houses, it is quite hard to type when your eyes are watering from carcinogenic fog).
For a paltry RMB 200 per month (about USD 24) I got unlimited access–the bills made no reckoning of the time I spent online, the amount of data I moved or any other measure of my use.
In the PRC getting dial-up internet access is generally more convenient than it is in the US, and my PRC wireless card was not much faster than dial-up access. But to me the card was so much better than a dial-up connection. Not having to fuss with phone jacks and wires or be in a specific place to work just unleashed me, in both literal and abstract ways. That access helped me write my first law review article and was a reason I started this blog. I could read the PRC financial press on the web, read US law review articles through Westlaw and send emails almost as easily as thinking. Any time I wanted to check a fact or specific legal provision, I could. That made it easier to sustain the effort.
Since leaving China I’ve often missed that ubiquitous internet access, and I’ve found it somewhat harder to get traction on major writing projects. Being further away from the action is part of the problem. Also, there is more to distract me in the US. I read in English much faster than I do in Chinese, so here I tend to be much more promiscuous in my reading. This leads me into all kinds of interesting but not particularly productive tangents. For example, I’ve recently read Arthur Gelb’s 600+ page City Room, an account of his decades with the New York Times; Ned Rorem’s Lies, a volume of his journals, and the over-titled How Soccer Explains the World. All good stuff, but not things that will be footnoted in my next missive on PRC securities regulation. But I think another reason I’ve found it harder to write is simply that wireless internet access makes writing easier.
There’s almost something magical about it. It helps close the gap between an impulse to jot something and the actual act of doing it. Making a spark leap like that ought to be easy. The “distance” seems so small. But often it isn’t, at least not for me. And berating oneself about “you really must start this” often doesn’t help. Resistance seems to increase in tandem with pressure. So catching an impulse to write at the moment it arises can be critical. A wireless internet card somehow facilitates that.
Or at least that’s my rationalization for buying a new gizmo. Today I got set up for wireless surfing in the US.
Unlike in the PRC, here you cannot easily buy the card separate from buying the service. The terms are less favorable, too. The minimal package offered by Sprint costs $40 per month. For this $40/month I am limited to 20 megabytes per month, which may prove too little. And I had to sign a one-year contract. All that’s after spending $150 on a Sprint-sanctioned PCS card. And they charge you a bogus $40 activation fee. So I sank $250 with tax to get this up and running.
But the installation was a snap (no human will need this extensive manual). And it’s pretty fast. My earlier generation PRC service was a dramatic improvement over no access, but I generally kept multiple pages open and read one while another was loading. Sprint’s CDMA service is faster, though the performance is still slugglish compared to my office connection or home cable modem.
The bottom line is that once again I am untethered, free to surf from the cafes, parks and hideaways of another capital city.
October 16th, 2004 at 5:49 pm
Hi Walter. Thanks for the blog.
Based on your entry tracked down info on the Sui-e-Xing (GPRS) service from China Mobile. For those who can read Chinese, more info can be found at:
China Mobile main Sui-e-Xing page:
http://www.chinamobile.com/YDYW/hyyw.asp?classid=1&ClassChild_ID=14&Array_ID=124
China Mobile ShaanXi site has a more detailed description of the service (not sure if pricing is same in Beijing):
http://www.snmcc.com.cn/Enterprise/Common/102/2004/0513/11471.asp
This article lists roaming wireless options in China:
http://it.2618.com/article/2003/2003-8-19/12710.html
BTW, I’m going to try signing up for the service tomorrow. Any “gotchas” (areas of country w/o svc, exhorbitant deposits for foreigners, long-term contracts, etc.) I should know about?
Thanks again.
October 17th, 2004 at 3:16 am
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October 17th, 2004 at 3:39 am
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October 17th, 2004 at 3:49 am
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October 17th, 2004 at 3:49 am
Thanks for the link. I hope you had good luck getting GPRS service set up. You can probably now provide better info than I can, but for what it’s worth I found the best way to get GPRS set up in Beijing was to go directly to a big China Mobile (Zhongguo Yidong) office. I went to the one at “San Yuan Qiao.” Predictably, there was a crowd, but the service was really quite good. A uniformed agent met me at the door, asked what I needed and pointed me to the right place. They had a “take a number” system that prevented the usual free-for-all at the windows.
When they called my number I was able to get service set up quickly. Just filled out some forms, paid and waited a few minutes while they made a phone call to activate the service. I tested it in my laptop before leaving the office.
Actually my service was in the name of a PRC friend, but that person did NOT have a Beijing ID. China Mobile didn’t hassle us about that at all other than imposing an RMB500 deposit. I’m not sure if the same deal for “wai di ren” would be available to “lao wai” but I suspect it might.
I paid RMB2,850 for a “Sierra Wireless AirCard 750″ from one of the stalls at Bai Nao Hui, but by now those may be cheaper. In fact it’s probably best to buy the card directly from China Mobile with the service; as I recall they bundled a wireless PC card and service in a way that would have been cheaper than buying them separately as I did.
The card I bought came with printed installation instructions in Chinese only, but thankfully the accompanying CD installed English language software on my laptop (which was running Windows XP in English). This may be something to be careful about; some Chinese software seems to require a Chinese OS to run right–I’ve sometimes been unable to get PRC-market software to install correctly on an English language system, or if it installed not gotten the menus to appear in a readable form even though I have the Chinese language kit installed.
I think they charged me RMB80-something for a phone number for the GPRS account. As you probably know, you can spend more to get an auspicious number, but if you won’t use your GPRS number for voice calls, an unlucky or embarrassing number like 1414 7878 could be fine.
The software that came with the card (to be installed on my PC) did allow me to input a phone number and dial it through the card. In experiments I found I could hear people answer, but they couldn’t hear me talk back. A headset that plugs into the PC card might have solved that problem, but I never got one, nor did my mobile have a microphone.
The software also allowed me to send SMS (duan xin). I typed messages and destination phone numbers on the laptop, hit send and the messages would quickly appear on conventional mobiles. That was novel, but incoming messages with Chinese characters didn’t work, and I so I never really used that feature much.
I DID have a lot of hassles at first because I tried to get the service at some place in a shopping mall rather than a full blown China Mobile office. Some small shops didn’t even know what GPRS service was, or when I asked for it they tried to sell me a GPRS-enabled phone (yeah, I want to read web pages on display the size of a postage stamp!).
One little contract seller of phones and service told me I’d HAVE to get a person with a Beijing hukou to be my “dan bao,” but that simply was not true once I got to the real China Mobile office. (I drug a BJ friend to that place to be my guarantor, but once I completed the paperwork they said I could get the service up and running in a week or so. Uh-uh. That’s when I went in search of the San Yuan Qiao office, where things went smoothly.