The hostel I’m staying at now has good Wi-Fi so I haven’t used my Tigo USB modem for a couple of days now. Since I still have about a week of free Internet left, I decided to take the SIM card and use it on my Dell Streak Android phone instead.

My Dell Streak took the SIM card and showed “TIGO” as the network provider. When I opened the web browser I got a prompt if I wanted to auto-configure the data network. I chose “yes” but then I got a text message from +211005:

The terminal cannot be configured remotely, please visit the self care web site on ?URL for further assistance

For some reason instead of giving me the actual URL, it just gave me a question mark. I remember seeing the APN on the Tigo desktop software so I decided to just configure it manually.

On the Dell Streak, go to Settings -> Wireless & networks -> Mobile networks -> Access Point Names. Then simply add a new APN. I set the Name to TIGO and the APNto broadband.tigo.gt.

As soon as I saved my setting the data connection started working!

My phone also has an option to have it configured as aportable Wi-Fi hotspot so I gave that a try as well. Pretty straightforward, just set up the SSID and password. It worked quite well and seems to be just as fast as when I was using the USB dongle. If I had thought about this before I probably would’ve just purchased a SIM card and use my phone to share the connection with my netbook.

Unlike AT&T and Verizon, you don’t have to pay extra to allow tethering with Tigo. You can also purchase credit anytime when you need it, with the cheapest option at Q10 (about $1.28) for an hour of Internet.