Catshanghai

I have been using a Huawei E5830 mobile broadband router in Shanghai.

It allows me to create a personal 3G wireless hotspot. In other words my 3G China Unicom data signal can be shared between upto five devices such as my Nexus One phone and netbook.

The mifi device is smaller than a cellphone and fits neatly into a pocket or bag. It has a rechargeable lithium ion battery that gives about 5 hours of use. It was manufactured by Huawei, but the model I bought was rebadged as ‘Mifi’ by the UK mobile network operator Three. They have locked down the firmware so you can only use it with their simcard and tariff. I got round this problem by buying it from a UK Ebay seller who had unlocked the mifi by flashing it with new firmware. I paid 68.50 GBP for my mifi whereas Expansys HK are selling unlocked devices for over double the price.

My unlocked mifi allows my wifi devices to go online using any wcdma 3G sim and I can configure it using a browser in the same way as any other wireless router by entering 192.168.1.1 in the address bar. This means you can configure the device using any device with a browser. I have got the mifi to work using Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Jolicloud, although I had some difficulty getting Ubuntu to connect in the first instance.

You can make the mifi secure by setting WEP or WPA passwords and choosing whether or not to broadcast the SSID (the wifi access point name). The device still has a built in client, which works better with XP than Windows 7.

My wifi seems to work fine at getting online especially downtown, but it feels more temperamental in the Pudong hinterland. I have been able to use it to stream and download podcasts even video. The problems start when I try to connect to my VPN using PPTP. My first hurdle was changing the DNS address to Opendns or Google’s servers. The Netvigator firmware on the device forces you to use the mobile ISP’s DNS address. You can only get online with a VPN if you change the DNS server address. Otherwise, the GFW engages in the nasty practice of DNS poisoning, which is a bit like tearing up your address book so there is no way of knowing which numbers to dial.

There is a work around. You need to setup a dmz to a static ip address, which uses a different DNS server to the mifi device. Then my Nexus One connects fine, but my phone has a bug so it cannot sustain a PPTP VPN connection. In layman’s terms this means I can use my Nexus One’s wifi connection to talk to my mifi to momentarily pretend to be in the UK or US. I have a few minutes grace to bypass the bamboo firewall through to Facebook and Twitter before my Nexus One craps out and comes back to China. Maybe it is wrong to blame the mifi for this problem, but it will not let me connect to my VPN from my netbook.

I had more success sustaining a VPN connection from my Nexus One once I rooted it and installed the Cyanogenmod Rom, which lets me connect to a VPN using the openvpn protocol. Since I have stopped trying to use PPTP my mifi’s Internet connection has felt more reliable. PPTP is known for being fairly easy to detect and block. Am I being paranoid or does China Unicom timeout your 3G connection when they figure out you are using a VPN to get round the GFW?

After a few weeks I would give my mifi a qualified recommendation providing you buy a hacked device from Ebay and travel to locations that get good 3G data reception.