Boost Mobile Unblocking Port 80 Outbound for "PayAsYouGo" customers?

[2 Bunny]

If ya'all are familiar with it, early this year Boost Mobile started blocking port 80 outbound for its "PayAsYouGo" customers and redirecting any and every request to a webpage with a yellow banner. The only way around this was to use something beside port 80, such as the port that VPN uses. VPN was significantly slower, but it still got me online most of the time, even though it can be flaky at times and seems to consume more bandwidth than without.

During June, we took a vacation, and I set my account up for their "$2 Daily Unlimited" because I had forseen the possibility of communicating more than $2 worth of phone calls and text messages that day. As a side effect, port 80 outbound was temporarily unblocked, so I made sure to take advantage of the faster internet speed while I could. Later that day (after traveling a significant distance), I was using the Diamond, and it was like my phone just "fell off the map". I was replying to an SMS and got an error when I tapped "send". This was odd since I had exchanged several messages with that number earlier without incident. A more in depth check revealed that I couldn't dial an EvDo connection or even place outgoing phone calls (if I called out, I'd get Sprint PCS's "you're not on an activated phone" reminder), not even to 225 or 611, which usually work even if you don't have service. I figured it was an update and that I'd need those "update profile" and "update PRL" buttons which I had left out of my ROM since they cause plenty of undesired "side effects" for the phone.

A few days later, I found a CAB that could hook me up, but there were no updates available when I clicked both buttons. Now I had a phone that would eventually become unusable because it had those stupid "update profile" and "update prl" things in it (not to mention that they cannot be uninstalled without a hard reset). Later that day, it course corrected on its own and I was back to my usual "PayAsYouGo" service that actually worked.

Since I was now on "PayAsYouGo", I sent and received few to no messages and phone calls (since at $.1 per minute or message, it adds up fast) and hardly even turned on the 1900 radio. I knew I couldn't put off either hard resetting or cooking more custom ROMs much longer. Since there wasn't much any point to hard resetting, I was inspired to try and see if I could finish my Elite ROM series. This last week I have made incredible progress like never before, and that "breakage of service" back in June was really a "blessing in disguise". I learned how to more effectively use KHEB to isolate the problems that the default kitchen settings introduce by themselves and the SUPER SHNEAKY registry entries that prevent you from fixing the problems just by throwing in an EXT and calling it good. I'm down to just a small handful of issues now and plan on having this pretty much finished by Monday. I'll test it all week long and see if any more changes need to be made, then hopefully upload a release by that weekend...

Anyway, back to the present, yesterday, we were out and about and I had some downtime in an area with signal so I thought I'd dial an internet connection and see if everything was as I left it. I tapped PIE (since I hadn't loaded up Opera Mobile 10 on this experimental ROM yet), and to my surprise Google's Mobile homepage popped right up! I didn't get my hopes up just yet though, since it could've just been cached somehow or something. I put in a random search term and... it returned results. This was truly fascinating. When I got home, I sat on the couch that has Sprint signal and dialed the EvDo again, and sure enough, the Google Mobile homepage came up. This time, I went to MobileSpeedTest.com to find out if it was still going to work, and it miraculously did. I hit "test again" just for the heck of it. What a fantastic week...

Anyway, I was hoping to get some feedback from other BM customers, especially the ones who have migrated any Sprint device to Boost service (like myself). I'd be curious if the mysterious "unblockage of port 80" was because I had used the "$2 daily unlimited" that one day, or if Boost has finally permanently got rid of their stupid little games and decided to give us unrestricted access to outbound port 80 again.

Thanks for reading!

- 2 Bunny