Pinger Application for Internet via 3G Mobile Network Users

 

Developed in my spare time for my own use. Free to use. Written in VB.Net using Visual Studio 2005.

 

If you use a mobile network for your internet connection this program may come in handy. If your mobile network is like mine, you may find that when connected in HSDPA mode, your modem falls back to 3G mode when your connection is idle. This is presuambly to conserve network resources and or bandwidth at the cell level. However, when in areas of weak reception this can be a big problem.

 

When the modem falls back to 3G mode, it can sometimes take a long time to return to HSDPA mode when you need the connection again (for example, when you click a link on a webpage to request a page). This was such a problem for me that I wrote this program to try to get around the issue.

 

This program will ping a list of sites that you set up, every 5 seconds. It just sends a couple of bytes, not enough to hog your bandwidth, or that of your service provider. It just trickles a few bytes out of your internet connection every five seconds, just enough to prevent the modem from falling back to 3G mode. If you find it DOES fall back, use the burst button. The burst button sends 8k of meaningless data via UDP to my web site (thought it best to use mine - don't want suffer the wrath of Google or Microsoft!) - this data should be enough to wake up the connection. If it doesn't, try it a couple of more times.

 

For convenience, the sites you enter into the list are persisted when you quit the program, and automatically reloaded when you start it again. Also, I've written it in such a way that when minimised, it minimizes to a little icon on your system tray - nice and friendly. The icon has a context menu, allowing you to show the application window again, or quit the program.

 

I use this program religiously on my t-mobile connection. Just a note: If you are in a good reception area, you probably will not need this program, however, in areas of marginal reception, it really does make a serious difference!

 

In case you are interested, the program does the pinging on a seperate thread, so as not to hurt the GUI. The ping packets are one byte in length, no point is senselessly hitting web sites with large of packets of data to echo back. No point in consuming bandwidth either.

 

Enjoy.

 

Screenshot: The Pinger application running with the t-mobile web 'n' walk monitor program running in the background.

As can be seen, the program uses no discernable bandwidth, and the connections remains in HSDPA mode, rather than falling back

to 3G/GPRS mode.

 

 

 

 

 

Designed for Internet Explorer, Tested with IE6 & Firefox

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