Removing Hidden Proxy on Windows Mobile

For the longest time I’ve been on Fido with a unlocked (direct from Sony) Xperia X1a. I’ve never had any problems with it at all. Everything worked flawless. It was a great setup. Exchange, connecting to my VPN, etc…

Recently I setup a corporate plan with Rogers. Ended up getting a bunch of Xperia X1s at a discounted rate since I signed a 3 year on a bunch of lines… Turns out Rogers charges you for an “external IP” that you can use to connect to your business VPN. If you don’t add this option you will not be able to connect to a VPN.

After setting up the VPN.com apn on the new rogers (rogers firmware) Xperia X1s, I noticed that everything worked except simple web page browsing (in both browsers). No errors, just loaded completely blank pages. When changing apn back to internet.com everything worked fine. I automaticly assumed this was related to a “hidden proxy” configured somewhere on the phone.

From this behavior I went ahead and checked the config on the device, no proxies were configured anywhere. Rogers denied the proxy existed, I’m not sure if they do this because they don’t want anyone knowing their internet is being filtered/monitored, or if tech’s simply do not know.

While waiting for a call back from Tier 2 support, I went ahead and started fishing through the registry. I found a bunch of very odd registry entries pertaining to proxies. There was a SOCKS proxy configured, along with what appeared to be a HTTP Proxy, a few other entries also existed which were configured.

After removing these “odd” proxy registry keys, all of a sudden everything started working. Please note that if you modify these settings, you may break your configuration. Any of your providers “online” services (such as ring tone marketplace, application marketplace, etc…) also may cease to function properly (as these services are probably being hosted on their internal network).

To Remove:

1. Open your phone’s registry using any Windows Mobile Registry editor. I use “CeRegEditor” available at: http://ceregeditor.mdsoft.pl/

2. Open “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE”, then open “Comm”, then open “ConnMgr”. Under this value, you should be able to see all the devices configured GPRS/HSPA/HSDPA data connections. Browse through the folders and look for a “Proxy” entry. The “Proxy” entry is the configured hidden proxy. I simply deleted this key. If you find anything that has a value of “inet-new” or “inet-corp” you can safely ignore these as I have found they are part of the standard Windows Mobile firmware.

3. Take a look at the other folders under “ConnMgr”, you may notice a few items called “SOCKS”, and “HTTP”. Go into these folders, and remove the proxy values. As I mentioned before if you see any keys with the values “inet-new” or “inet-corp” you can safely ignore these.

Please note that this worked in my specific case. Your results may vary. Also insure that you have made a backup of the keys you have modified in case you need to revert back. Depending on the way your provider has configured your device you may also be tampering with other services (ie. MMS, WAP).