Dealing with telephone companies can be an interesting exercise. Sometimes they surprise you with how well they operate. Other times, well, we all know about the 15 minutes or 30 minutes on hold with Telstra. I needed to be able to have the ability for two GSM modems to call each other.

This uses what is called ‘Circuit Switched Data’ which just means that there is a connection involved like a phone call, rather than packet switching like networks. For some reason the carriers do not set up their SIM cards to allow circuit switched data. In fact some of the carriers charge you per month to have this capability. They also charge the calls at slightly different rates for some reason.

One of the reasons that they do this is that if you want to make an Internet call from a GSM modem, they need to actually provide a real modem in the exchange for you, rather than a virtual one for use over GSM. This does improve speed, but it means more infrastructure that needs to be paid for by the Telco.

I rang them up this morning after things were still not working. Not only had the units not been set up, they had no knowledge of my last call yesterday either. That is strange.


Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream in the USA have released a combination lock for their ice cream after a request from one of their customers who always was getting his ice cream nicked by housemates. Such a cool idea. The link to the story is here