Broadening the Band!
Saturday, May 29, 2010/5:02:45 PM
.There are these interests in unlocking the mobile broadband stick modems among the mobile owners of this piece of tech and the reason behind this is basically convenience, saving money and "portability". Just think of it, why would you carry around three usb modems for three different network carriers when you can just bring one of it!
In today's netaholic or webaholic day and age, people can't seem to get enough internet that they are even buying into this mobile internet sticks, or gadgets, and not only one, not two, but more. You got a laptop, a web capable mobile phone, this usb broadband stick and now the iPad. I for one feels depraved when 2 days pass-by without my regular diet of bits and bytes off the net, hehe.
So then, when I got my Neo-Vivid v1193 netbook, I purchased a Smartbro mobile broadband stick together with it. Just last June of 2009, that brand cost 1,995 pesos (Philippines), yup, it was that expensive back then but since I really "needed" it I bit the dust. But damn it! Smartbro doesn’t have a signal in my area, it is a 3G device and should be whirling my browser to the web and beyond but shuckz, I don’t have even a slow GPRS connection and since it is locked to only the Smart network I can’t put in another SIM card from other carriers which means it is totally useless to me. I thought of selling or swapping it but I decided to find some way to use it.
Then one solution came to me by surprise in Manila while I was surfing with my home pc connected to the net through my Nokia N70 phone. Of course, when you run out of load and only have 1 peso in your credits, you can still browse the Smart home page. Then the scriptkiddie in me opened up a Command prompt window and sent a ping request to www.google.com and voila! I found out that I can still connect to any web site on the net by sending out ping probes. So I studied how to take advantage of this “free Smart network service” with success a few days later.
While browsing the Smart home page is free I am wondering why it is still online (at least by pinging those sites) when I only had 1 Peso left. After loading up on more credits and searching the web for a few days, I found a way to get a free and unlimited connection. I found this cool app called PingTunnel* that allows anyone to set up a ping server and use that server as a proxy for web browsing. This set up works using both a mobile phone and/or a usb broadband stick …it’s really cool!
Somehow, although this personalized free network of mine is good enough for me, still there are dead spots in planet Earth where Smartbro (and other networks for that matter) doesn’t work. in this situation the only thing you can do is to buy another usb stick offered by other networks having a service in that specific area. In the Philippines there are three of these, making this a costly alternative. A better option is unlocking one of the mobile USB broadband sticks one have!
By having an unlocked or openline version of these sticks, nobody is constrained to one SIM card or network only. Anyone can easily remove the sim card from the dongle and replace it with another network’s sim and off you go up, up, and connect!
But how does unlocking work? Well, perhaps the best answer I can give you right now is “I don’t know” because frankly I do not know the inner workings of this hack.
But let me tell about this funny thing though…
I am having a hard time trying to find a piece of software off the net that would unlock my Smartbro USB modem which is a MF627. So what I did was have my MF627 modem unlocked by cellphone technicians. The good thing though is that in my search for the magic sauce I met this technician in Litex, Quezon City who is proud enough to brag about his skill in cracking the firmware of the dongle. I am not convinced though so I went to do some social engineering (remember I am a wannabe hacker…hehe). Now just after a few minutes I actually got him into showing me not only the software he is using in order to hack the usb stick but also the source code for the software itself...incredible.
