T-Mobile Hotspots, WPA and unsupported devices.

I recently obtained a Nokia E61 "smartphone" with WiFi and have been trying to learn how to get the most out of it. I would like to configure it to work with T-Mobile Hotspots using their WPA encryption settings.

What T-Mobile has done to implement WPA is kind of tricky. Each hotspot has two SSIDs: there is the broadcast one "tmobile" and the hidden one "tmobile1x". The "tmobile1x" SSID is WPA encrypted. One problem is that T-Mobile only supports WPA when the customer uses their Windows-based connection manager program. This leaves out customers who are not using Windows. I've been Googling and have found some users of Mac, Linux and WPA Supplicant have been getting T- Mobile's WPA to work on their machines.

Here's a general article about it.

Here's an article about setting up WPA Supplicant to connect. Here's an article about setting up your Mac to connect. The problems are:

1. Both the E61 and WPA are pretty new to me and
2. The WPA options on the e61 don't excatly match what's in those articles.

I don't know enough to be able to translate that information into settings for the e61. I e-mailed HotSpot technical assistance but have not received a response. I'm willing to bet, when they do respond, they won't tell me what I want to know.

On the E61 when you select "WLAN security mode" = "WPA/WPA2" (The other choices are "Open", "WEP" & "802.1x") you get a host of other settings. If you pick "WPA mode" = "EAP" you can allow or disallow TKIP and enter another menu for "EAP plug-in settings. That menu has six sub menus (EAP-SIM, EAP-AKA, EAP-TLS, EAP-PEAP, EAP-TTLS & EAP- LEAP), each of which can be enabled or disabled, reordered, and have individual settings changed. Of them, only EAP-LEAP seems to use a username and password.

The 802.1x settings are the same as for WPA except that there is no setting to allow/disallow TKIP.

The two how-to articles above both call for "TTLS-PAP" or just "PAP", neither of which appears on the E61 menus.

Several folks have tried combinations of EAP-TTLS and EAP-LEAP on the E61 without success. The EAP-TTLS settings ask for "certificates" and "realms" neither of which seem to be set in the two articles above.

Several of us on HowardForums.com have been poking at this without much luck. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Donald Newcomb DRNewcomb (at) attglobal (dot) net