OK, so here I am in Europe with my Motorola V60i and an O2
pay-as-you-go SIM, trying to get GPRS data access for my laptop. I
bought the SIM from www.telestial.com because it was advertised as
offering data access, but it seems that's not the case. While the
phone's WAP browser was simple to set up, trying to use the "internet"
or "open.internet" APNs gets a failed connection.

I had the same problem on a trip last year using a Vodafone SIM; again
it was advertised as offering wireless data but failed to deliver.

So at this point of frustration I'm looking for any packages that allow
tunneling IP traffic over WAP. Since WAP uses UDP port 9201 I took a
look at vtun (http://vtun.sourceforge.net) but it needs some tweaking
before it can be used. Even though vtun supports tunneling over UDP, it
uses a TCP listener for session establishment. I'm recompiling it now
with a tweak to use UDP instead, but haven't gotten to testing it yet.

Of course then I have some other hoops to jump through; since vtun runs
on Linux I'm running it on my Windows laptop inside a VMware VM. I have
to set my Windows default route to point to the VM, and let vtun on the
VM forward the traffic out to the actual GPRS session. Pretty
ridiculous. (Fortunately VMware lets you connect USB devices directly
to the VM, so I don't have to make 2 extra roundtrips through the
Windows IP stack.)

Surely there's some easier way. Something like SOCKS5 with Permeo's
SOCKScap sounds like it might work, but that again requires it to
forward all traffic over UDP and SOCKS is not known for being good with
UDP. Ultimately I just want POP/SMTP and SSH access, but all of my
POP/SMTP is SSL protected so it's not straightforward to proxy that.
IP-layer forwarding is really the only way to go.

This would all be so much easier if telcom companies would just offer
the same array of services to all their customers, regardless of
billing method. They already have the freedom to set different
prices/tariffs for each class of customer, so what's the problem?
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc
Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support