Telephony and 768kbps Broadband Internet Access at any location in Europe without landlines.
Janet and Peter have just decided to buy a house in Spain. The problem is that like most new out of town houses it has no landlines. So the only way they can telephone is to use their mobile phone. Even though they can use their mobile connected to their computer for emails and internet access it is complicated to set up, very slow on GSM networks at 9600bps and quite expensive at speeds of up to 60kpbs on GPRS networks particularly for downloading large files. They also discovered that their mobile phone did not work reliably inside the house as they were in a poor signal area.
What they needed was the equivalent of house phone that anybody could use but that would also give them low cost but high-speed broadband access. Fortunately for them their estate agency had just heard about the new Desktop Mobile from Burnside Telecom Ltd.
This new ‘fixed cellular terminal’ provides telephone, SMS text, email and Internet access at any location within GSM/GPRS mobile networks. All they needed to do was to insert their mobile SIM into the Desktop Mobile and connect an ordinary house telephone. So they purchased a Moviestar SIM from Telefonica giving them GSM telephony and GPRS data. They then connected three ordinary house phones located in different rooms. The antenna supplied with the Desktop Mobile produced a much better signal than their handheld mobile and they were able to locate the antenna for strongest signal using the in built signal strength meter.
All they had to do now was to pick up a handset and dial just as they used to do on their home phone in England. They could even compose send and receive SMS text messages using the display on the Desktop Mobile.
Their estate agent had also told them about the Broadsat one way satellite broadband internet service at only €189year. So to connect to this they had to buy a 60cm satellite dish which was pointed at the Eutelsat satellite located at 7 degrees east. The dish had then to be connected to their computer via a Digital Video Broadcast [DVB] box using the USB connection. So this provided a downlink connection at browsing speeds of 768 kbps and high speed file downloads at 2Mbps. To establish an uplink connection they used their Burnside box in GPRS mode. Since uplink data is primarily from keyboard or email sending this turned out to be very economical as the charge is based on amount of data sent and not on connect minutes as GSM calls are. Even though they were on the Internet the Desktop Mobile could still be used to make and receive phone calls.
To complete their communication system they also decided to connect their Burnside unit to their alarm system so that if their alarm were activated they would receive an immediate SMS text message. When Pete has got more time he’s also going to set up the Burnside Desktop Mobile so that he can send it a text message to turn on his garden sprinkler system.
