O2 Wifi Hotspot Insanity

I have been frustrated on each occasion over the last three months that I have visited a public wifi hotspot. Frustrated because while I have been paying O2 for wifi access it hasn't worked ever since I upgraded my iPhone for an Android HTC Desire (see the backstory).

More generally my problems have been, the inability to "merge" two or more calls into a single conference and more significantly an error message each time I attempted to access to a BT Openzone hotspot or a Cloud hotspot.

I have had a complaint with O2 for many weeks and have provided details to numerous people but received little help.

A few weeks ago I did resolve the merge call problem. The solution to this is that O2 only provide this on their iPhone tariff. Changing back to the iPhone tariff, from a same priced smartphone tariff, resolved this immediately. They don't admit this anywhere but this was the only change required. Suffice to say that an iPhone is not required but the standard iPhone "bolt on" tariff includes the merge call feature and other tariffs do not. No-one I ever spoke to at O2 understands this. Hopefully this will save some-one else some grief.

Regarding the wifi access, my fix is to change the the user agent string so that the browser reports itself as an iPhone.

The default user agent reports

"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-gb; HTC Desire Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1"

This clearly identifies the phone as an Android HTC Desire. Changing the user agent string to the same as the iPhone gives

"Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16"

This can be trivially changed under Android Froyo version by typing in "about:debug" in the location bar of the stock browser and then selecting menu -> Settings -> UAString and then selecting iPhone.

This works for both the Cloud and BT Openzone hotspots. This is only required to register the device for the first time. Thereafter the MAC address is recorded and access is automatically granted to future connections. This problem has cost me many hours of phone calls and numerous cups of coffee in various hotspots to resolve. It is good that the solution is so simple but annoying that O2 themselves were never able to resolve it.

Using the iPhone user agent string is likely to be only appropriate for customers on the iPhone tariff but I believe that O2 checks for only a small, exact, set of user agent strings during the hotspot registration process. Thus if you get an error across all hotspots then it may be that the user agent reported is not one that O2 is looking for. This is a system that is so brittle and error prone that they should at least have the appropriate logging in place to diagnose these problems but alas they don't.

I hope this helps someone avoid some of the frustration I went through.

update - 4 Nov 2010

O2 has offered a £30 goodwill credit for my trouble.

Wierd spam

Anonymous left the following the comment on the blog entry below

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Being fluent in Chinese (actually I used Google translate) this translates to

"Aid friends message, video chat rooms, adult mapping station, erotic video, erotic forum, beautiful pictures, 080 video chat rooms, are sister wall qk176, 18sxe adult Studios, 080 video chat rooms, free dating and sexuality at a piece, Taiwan adult network, erotic a film, chat friends, Taiwan Sex, Valentine's mapping, office workers chat rooms f1, adult network, are sister friends, adult video chat rooms Changhua, Taiwan situation Color network, free chat, beautiful friends, and G-string beauty photo, erotica, free video chat rooms, 777 adult area, IMs as text chat rooms, 0401 video sex, free porn videos, adult video, free video, is Mei wall self-timer, ut chat room, free video, free video g, forces of eight adult chat rooms ut,"

The question is why?

Usually this would have two functions:

1) Increase the number of search terms that would result in the page appearing.

2) Increase the chance of the page being classified as "dubious"

This still doesn't answer why anyone would either want alter the number of hits the page gets. Of course by including the comment text here - in English and Chinese I must have tripled the impact.

Follow up: Google finds at least 500 other blog comments with the same spam.

Legacy, what legacy ?

So with Tony Blair resigning, and the subsequent talk of the nature of his legacy, I have been giving some thought to my own legacy. What has particularly alarmed me is he speed at which the builders have been at ripping, tearing and generally teasing the wood-work in our attic into a well designed living area.

Compare their work to mine today .....

My current project is adding functionality to a set of eclipse plug-ins that will aid software developers with the incorporation of a specific security framework used in my company into their own software projects. This security framework is also my responsibility. Now if you are a software developer, or at least a software developer using Java and Eclipse, you may have little idea about what I just said but if you aren't I bet you haven't a clue - and this is my point.

The best outcome for this project is that it improves productivity but because security requirements are so diverse even after using the the plug-in manual tweaking will still be required afterwards. Some people will use it while others will choose not to. Within a couple of years technology will have moved on and there will be a good chance it will become redundant.

Developing software can be considered architecture but despite the use of design patterns like facades, factories and singletons none of what we develop has the endurance of a cathedral, a house or even a loft conversion. No future archaeologist is going to be digging and stumble an eclipse plug-in - "thought to be particularly fine specimen of software dating from the early 21st century".

If this wasn't bad enough none of my children have yet sailed solo around the world, climbed Mt Everest or K2 or in fact become child prodigies at anything. This despite all the advantages of genes and environment.

Would some-one please notice me.