random neuron misfires

I’ve been an AT&T customer for a very long time; over a decade of mobile phone use with their services, from my age’ing Nokia to my various Treo devices to several RIM BlackBerry phones.

I’m currently on the biggest, baddest Enterprise “Unlimited” data, “Unlimited” texting plan they offer, including International Roaming and texting as well, for when I travel overseas. I also have a second line for data only, which I use in my Novatel MiFi device, a SIM card previously plugged directly into my laptop so I could get online while on the train traveling to/from the office.

I recently picked up a BlackBerry PlayBook to use for work, and have been hacking on it a little bit. One thing that was lacking, was “always-on” Internet service. You have to use WiFi or tethering to get the tablet onto the Internet. In fact, you can’t even use the tablet at all unless it’s connected to a wireless network of some kind.

I just called AT&T to see what the additional cost would be to add “Tethering” to my existing phone features. The cordial operator told me that my current “Unlimited” plan is costing me $30.00/month, and to add the “Unlimited + Tethering” package, it would be $80.00/month (a $50.00/month increase).

I’m floored that I’d have to pay an additional $50/month for something that is no different than using my existing phone to browse the web. In other words, there’s no difference at all in the bits-and-bytes coming across the 3G connection if I browse the web via my phone’s browser, or browse the web via the PlayBook (or my laptop), through my phone’s 3G connection over bluetooth, via tethering.

The operator spoke to her supervisor and came back and told me that if I added tethering to my current “Unlimited” plan, I’d lose the unlimited capability, it would drop to 2GB/month, max, and I could never go back to an unlimited plan ever again, if I changed it now.

After testing several different methods, I finally managed to get around the 5-client restriction on the Novatel MiFi 2372 I recently purchased from Amazon.

First, some background information:

The Novatel 2372 I purchased had “some minor issues“, and I was looking for a way to get at the firmware, or updated versions of the firmware, so I could address and hopefully fix these. I was more than happy to start rolling my own firmware, to put onto the device if necessary.

If you search the Interweb, there are hundreds of posts, blogs and webpages out there on how to tweak the MiFi device by making changes to the exported config.xml file and re-import it. Some of these work, some (even after making the changes), do not. One of them is the hard-coded limit on incoming device (client) connections on the MiFi itself… this is hard-locked at 5 connections, no matter how you modify the config.xml to support more.

You can however, update the number of DHCP addresses the DHCP server on the MiFi will give out, just not the number of incoming connections to the MiFi.

But I figured out a better way to solve this in a very clean and elegant way. Unfortunately, it involves a second router… but one with a LOT more functionality. This can probably be reproduced by a smaller router, but I used what I already had in my personal lab to create this working proof of concept.