ASUS Eee PC & Nokia E51 automated HSDPA (Windows XP)

I have been looking for a cheap and seamless way to connect to the internet on my ASUS Eee with the minium of equipment and no hassle.

I considered internal HSDPA but eventually decided on this method to avoid modding my Eee and save on cost (data is cheaper as an addon to my t-mobile contract than as a seperate contract).

My configuration consists of

• ASUS Eee - 4gb SSD, 2gb of RAM & 4gb SDHC, running Windows XP.
• Nokia E51 - Fairly small, neat phone with HSDPA and Bluetooth (and Exchange Activesync Support).
• Cirago BTA310 - Micro USB BT dongle, small enough to never be removed from EEE, this could be modded inside the EEE.

This is setup with a dial up connection called HSDPA using the virtual bluetooth modem (drivers with windows, no third party software is used). Connecting to the internet required nothing more than dialing the HSDPA connection. No interaction is required on the nokia since you can authorise the laptop to be allowed to connect without the phone prompting.

This is a good start, but i wanted it to be easier so I wrote this batch file.

@echo off
:wifi
rasdial HSDPA /disconnect
wait 3
ipconfig >ipconfig.txt
findstr /C:"Wireless" ipconfig.txt
if not errorlevel 1 goto wifi

:hsdpa
rasdial HSDPA
ipconfig >ipconfig.txt
findstr /C:"Wireless" ipconfig.txt
if not errorlevel 1 goto wifi
wait 3
goto hsdpa

You can use my batch file if you want by copying this text into notepad and saving it as "hsdpa.bat" or something. You should also download wait and put it in the same folder, this is to slow down the batch file and reduce its CPU usage.

This batch file detects if the wireless card is running using the output of ipconfig, based on this it dials or drops the HSDPA connection as necessary. This means i can now use the WIFI On/Off toggle (fn+f2) to decide whether i want to use HSDPA or WIFI connections.

This works but required a batch file to be running all the time which is not ideal. The final step was to use firedaemon which allows you to install any app (or batch file) as a system service. I used an older version, firedaemon 1.6 lite which is free.

The outcome of this is that when i open and resume my EEE, it takes approximately 6 seconds from pressing the power button to be online using HSDPA (or WIFI).

In the near future I intend to extend this batch file to dial VPN connections to my work and home routers whenever i am not on these networks. I will do this by detecting what the DNS server, default gateway etc is.