Bell’s iPhone Wormhole Shrinks

It seems that Bell’s new network is getting a bit better at locating my whereabouts. As you can see from this image, it now considers me to be somewhere in the southern NWT. Clearly some sort of GPS problem there. Getting there, Bell!

Workaround for Bell’s Whitehorse iPhone Wormhole

As I posted yesterday, there appears to be a problem with Bell’s new 3G HSPA network in Whitehorse. The core issue seems to be its location setting: for some reason it reports to devices, at least to iPhones, that they are in Edmonton, Alberta. This not only affects location, of course, but also time and date since Edmonton is located one hour ahead in the Mountain Time (MT) zone. (Whitehorse is in the Pacific Time (PT) zone.)

So, on an iPhone in Whitehorse, the following problems will manifest:

• if time is configured to automatically set itself, the iPhone will be an hour ahead;
• if you use location services, such as in the Maps app, the iPhone will resolve itself to be in Edmonton; and
• if you sync with a network calendar, such as MobileMe, the iPhone will automatically set time zone support to the MT zone.

One other risk, which I haven’t been able to verify to date, is that phone calls may be getting assessed as having being made from Edmonton. That could mean that local calls in Whitehorse may be billed as long distance. I’m trying to verify this with Bell.

It’s easy enough to work around the network problems on an iPhone. Unfortunately, you’ll lose one of the device’s coolest and most useful features in the process: location services.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Bell irons out the wrinkles in the local network sooner rather than later. In the meantime, here’s how to make your iPhone behave in Whitehorse.

We Humans Are Nothing Without Technology

Humanity is a strange concept. I don’t even know if we get it any more.

We seem so prone to disqualify it, to deny it’s relevance as a contributing factor in our designs and actions.

Governments are inclined to disengage from basic humanitarian values and needs in order to push forth fundamentalist political concepts.

Businesses promote altered states of reality with the designed intention of affecting what it means to be human.

Then, of course, there are geeks like me.

iPhone Feature Exclusive to New Bell Network: the Wormhole

Astrophysicists have been attempting to discover a means of traversing great distances in little or no time for decades. It’s the key to long-distance space travel. You know: hyperspace, time warp, wormholes, all that stuff?

Well, it seems Bell has figured it out. Check out this screen shot from my iPhone this morning, and consider that I was in Whitehorse at the time:

My Whitehorse iPhone in Edmonton

See that? My iPhone can be in two places at once: Whitehorse and Edmonton. Try that NASA!

Of course, it’s not a wormhole, it’s a bug in the new network. I’ve checked it out on two local iPhones and they both locate themselves in Edmonton.

The iPhone’s location-awareness capability is powered by a combination of cell tower location, Wifi-stations, and GPS. Unfortunately, it seems that the Whitehorse cell tower has been set up as an Edmonton cell tower and it’s leading local devices to believe likewise.

It doesn’t seem like such a big deal at first except a couple of other things auto-configure to Edmonton, too: the time zone and the calendar. Which totally screwed me up for a couple of meetings today.

And, of course, don’t go using the Find my iPhone feature locally until Bell sorts this problem out. Here’s where my iPhone is, according to the MobileMe service:

A similar thing happened a few years back when Bell first set up the 1X CDMA network. For the first few weeks of that network’s life, a lot of local phones thought they were in Ontario. Looks like a misconfiguration redux with the new HSPA network.

One can only hope, though, that Bell isn’t considering calls made on local devices as having originated in Edmonton. Or else a lot of people around here are gonna get real angry real quick when their bills roll in.

Working around the network misconfiguration is pretty easy on the iPhone, though you have to give up some features. I’ll post details tomorrow.

Why the iPhone is Important to the Horse

 

Any day now Apple’s iPhone will be available to Whitehorse residents.

This is huge news: the iPhone is widely regarded as the world’s most advanced handheld computing and telecommunications device.

Along with the significant network upgrade that Bell has installed locally to support the iPhone, and Northwestel’s recent kick-ass fibre upgrade to the internet, the arrival of the iPhone puts the Yukon’s capital on the world map in terms of mobile connectivity.

Which is remarkable, considering we’re just a little town of 20,000+ people.

But is the iPhone really all that big a deal?

In a word: yes.

Sometimes, Reality Just Isn’t Real Enough

One of the most fascinating aspects of evolving mobile platforms like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android is their  promise of ubiquitous computing.

Now there’s a scary phrase: ubiquitous computing. What does it mean?

First, ubiquitous = omnipresent. Like, everywhere. As in, tripping over it all over the friggin’ place.

But, really: who wants to find computers around every corner?

So it seems ubiquitous + computing does not necessarily equal the culinary nirvana that is chocolate + peanut butter. (“Hey, you got ubiquity in my computer!” just doesn’t have that same… je ne sais quoi.)

But, hold on. Computing does not necessarily mean computer.

Still Life of a Text Message

When an artist composes a still life of a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers, it is often with the intent of paying studied homage to a subject that has been rendered nearly invisible by its ubiquity.

Here, then, is my still life of that most common of contemporary artifacts: the text message.

iPhone in the Yukon on November 4?

Electronista is reporting (Sources: Bell to carry iPhone Nov. 4) that the iPhone will debut on the new Bell/Telus high-speed HSPA network on November 4, the same day that the carriers plan to flip the network’s switch.

They report that handset prices will be standard with what we’ve seen to date:

$99, $199 and $299 for the 8GB iPhone 3G, 16GB iPhone 3GS and 32GB iPhone 3GS respectively.

Bell’s pricing for monthly plans will be based on the company’s existing “Smarphone Combo” plans, which run from about $45 for bare-minimum minutes and data to $100 for massive talk time and unlimited data.

The real question is: will the iPhone be in the Yukon on November 4? And if it is, will there be more than a half-dozen or so?

My guess: supply will be constrained past Christmas. Prepare to line up if you want one. Then be prepared to be disappointed when they’re all gone. It’s a vicious cycle, I know.