SprintPCS for internet access

So I went ahead and purchased the data cable and an extra battery from cellphoneshop.net, pretty decent prices, though delivery took a little while. My phone is a samsung A660. There are full instructions here, but really all it requires is:
-plugging it in
-opening network prefs, where you see it recognize the phone
-edit the new interface’s settings as follows: phone number: #777, Modem: Sprint PCS Vision

That should be about it. It only takes a few seconds for it to connect, as evidenced here where I initiated some pings while it was disconnected, so it had to ‘dial’.

andre@gyro[~]ping -c 10 dreness.com
PING dreness.com (69.93.125.249): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=0 ttl=42 time=5099.65 ms
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=1 ttl=42 time=5436.26 ms
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=2 ttl=42 time=4551.91 ms
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=3 ttl=42 time=3636.56 ms
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=4 ttl=42 time=2698.26 ms
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=5 ttl=42 time=1735.95 ms
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=6 ttl=42 time=935.585 ms
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=7 ttl=42 time=490.015 ms
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=8 ttl=42 time=532.631 ms
64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=9 ttl=42 time=413.305 ms

You will undoubtedly notice that the web looks far worse through a sprint cellular connection. This is due to a proxy server that compresses the hell out of images. Here is a comparison of an original image vs what it looks like through the sprint cellular compression (also note the file size differences displayed in the Activity window). I’ve taken two screenshots and exported those two PDFs as jpegs @ 100% quality:

Via the real Internet:

Via the SprintPCS Internet:

The download speed is quite sporadic, but average throughput seems to hover around 3 KB/s or so, with bursts as high as 20 KB/s.

Here’s curl output for a 1.5 MB download, which included one disconnect + automatic reconnect (the download did not abort), and also a brief concurrent upload of a small file (28 KB):

andre@gyro[~]curl -O https://dreness.com/bits/cool/electricity.mpeg
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed          Time             Curr.
                                 Dload  Upload Total    Current  Left    Speed
100 1559k  100 1559k    0     0   2951      0  0:09:01  0:09:00  0:00:00  5555