Harri Salminen's Forum Nokia Blog

Random thoughts about mobile (enterprise) application development.

Disabling network access when abroad

widianuser | 22 July, 2007 22:44

This summer I was able to take a wonderful two-week trip abroad with my family. One day during the trip I realized that I had a dangerous (=expensive) setup in my terminal:

lots of applications doing automatic network operations
every application has roaming check turned off (reason is here, in my older post)
all applications are set up to download as much as possible, because I have a flat-rate data plan when at home

My first reaction was that I started to launch applications and manually changing their network settings. After doing that for a while I got frustrated when I understood that same project was waiting for me when I get back home, in order to allow network traffic again. Then I got an idea how to make sure my applications are not doing unwanted network operations (which would cost in a worst case something around 10€/MB).

This trick worked fine at least in my E61: I opened the terminal's access point settings (Tools->Settings->Connection->Access points) and created a brand new access point by copying the settings from my previous access point (Options->New access point->Use existing settings). I renamed the new AP to "travelling" so that I could find that easily. Then I opened the settings of the AP that I had configured to all applications and made that AP invalid by making a minor change to setting field "Access point name". Now I was sure that there weren't applications opening network connection unless I explicitly allowed it to do so by selecting the new AP - if an application tried to use old AP it didn't work because of changed AP name. When an application tried to make a network connection, it either failed with broken AP ("Packet data connection not available") or application prompted for new AP.

Returning to "home network" was now easy; I deleted the AP named "travelling" and returned the original AP to its correct settings. Applications found network again and those applications I had allowed to use network abroad prompted for new AP to replace the missing one.