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We Love T-Mobile 3G

24th December 2007 at 17:55

I've been running off a T-Mobile 3G connection for the past few days, and it is annoying me. Sure, 500 kbps is pretty good for a wireless connection that's only costing me £5/month, but what's annoying me is the way they have a transparent HTTP proxy that compresses the HTML and CSS, inserts its own JavaScript, and reduces image quality, all in an attempt to save their precious bandwidth.

Fine in theory, but in practice a lot of the sites I want to visit now don't work. We're not just talking 'oh, it looks a bit pants' - although thanks to the loss of image quality, every site does. But I could put up with that. No, the problem is more like 'the images are unreadable', 'there are javascript errors', 'no style sheets are working', and sometimes even 'oh look, the page is completely blank'.

If you're going to intercept and fiddle with your customers data, the least you can do is to make sure you don't do any destructive changes. Nothing for it - going to have to set up a VPN.

Comments

  1. I remeber fondly t-mobile's meddling, although given i had the 10 gig option i felt justified when i played (and downloaded all the patches for it) WoW over it back before i had broadband in one house.

    The other way to try would be with a socks proxy to your server.

    ssh -D 1080 user@radiac.net

    and then forward your web-traffic through your socks4 proxy on localhost:1080

    Although that might be less simple a solution if you are still windowsing...
    Gemma Hentsch24th December 2007 at 18:14
  2. Sweet, I had no idea that you could use SSH like that! I was going to go and install some over-complicated VPN stuff, but it works great, even on windows with putty - thanks!
    Amusingly, it's actually faster now it doesn't have to be rewritten :)
    radiac24th December 2007 at 20:18
  3. OpenVPN is, of course, great, if you want to go down that route. :)
    OMG ME AGAIN! (Andr)ew that is24th December 2007 at 23:33
  4. Wow, it looks like they're doing some really naughty stuff to your web traffic. Luckily, my phone just has a direct internet connection on the 3G net - I think it's NATed, but apart from that, it works just great. I pay a bit more than £5/month though .. :-/

    Merry Christmas!
    Mihtjel25th December 2007 at 21:27
  5. Well, to be honest I'm not sure where I got the £5 from. I think I made it up. It's actually £1/month more with this unlimited data package, but will probably work out at about £15/month more over the next year or so when you factor in the price of a phone. But still, it's annoying how they fiddle with my http traffic. Still - socks to the rescue!
    radiac26th December 2007 at 14:36
  6. There is a proxy setting to put in on the datacards that bypasses the image shrinking and stuff. Also are you on an option for using the phone as a modem?
    Bud4th January 2008 at 22:40
  7. Hi Bud! Yeah, I'm using my phone as a modem, with the w+w plan.
    radiac5th January 2008 at 08:55
  8. I'll see if I can dig out the settings to bypass the proxy and email you them.

    I notice they now have an utility for the usb modems that allows you to change the compression settings.
    Bud5th January 2008 at 11:57

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