Re: Possibly stupid GPRS/3G v WIFI selection strategy

"Peter" <nospam@nospam9876.com> wrote in message
news:v4di67ttc9j1a3cf72890sg69mhrs9uj53@4ax.com...
> I was trying to use the Ipad2 on a train today.
>
> It barely worked.
>
> What it looks like is this:
>
> The Ipad uses wifi in preference to GPRS/3G. That is reasonable.
>
> The problem is that nowadays the majority of wifi access points are
> commercial ones (especially at railway stations through which the
> train passes, even if it does not stop) and these are unusable BUT
> they are not encrypted so the Ipad tries to connect to them.
>

So do most things, my XP Netbook & Android

> A smart thing to do would be to test connectivity to a known site
> (e.g. apple.com) but it evidently doesn't do that...
>

It would succeed on port 80 as the transparent proxy intercepts all
connection and produces the logon page...

> But every time the Ipad comes across an apparently good wifi signal it
> tries to connect to it, which buggers up the GPRS/3G operation.
>
> A second part of the problem is that the strategy for dumping a wifi
> signal and reverting back to GPRS/3G is very slow. It seems to take
> almost minutes, so encountering a bit of commercial wifi fairly often
> means you get NO connectivity at all.
>
> The solution is to disable wifi if on a train, but that's pretty
> stupid.
>

I don't see why its stupid. The stupid thing is to have an open network
that's not open. Even a simple password scheme, say where the wep key was
the same as the ssid, or the ssid was say pw=123456 would solve this.

> Also the Ipad2 displays GPRS as 3G which is wrong.

Others have answered this

In message <j4bjo5$7os$1@news.albasani.net>, at 00:40:04 on Fri, 9 Sep
2011, Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm@gmail.com> remarked:
>> A smart thing to do would be to test connectivity to a known site
>> (e.g. apple.com) but it evidently doesn't do that...
>
>It would succeed on port 80 as the transparent proxy intercepts all
>connection and produces the logon page...

They often don't intercept whatever port Tweetdeck is using. I had one
of those in the USA the other week (and have seen it in other parts of
the world) viz: a subscription wifi service at an airport/hotel which
give "free" access to Twitter.
--
Roland Perry