Community Matters

I’ve posted about getting 3G modems to work under Linux before. But trying to get the UK version of the Huawei E220 to work (actually, O2′s website claims it’s an E160 and Linux can’t decide whether it’s an E220 or E270) I ran into some surprising problems.

First, the dumb one. Contrary to US CDMA 3G modems, the European HSDPA ones need a SIM card. Took me a while to realize that I had to rip open the “software package”, find the SIM card and install it.

Duh.

After that it’s the usual dance – plug it in, wait for the option driver to recognize it (I’m running a 2.6.29 kernel but it should work with the stock kernels as well – this is not a particularly new chip), then wait for Network Manager to realize it’s there (tends to take a while, some times several minutes). I tried this under Fedora 10 but I hear that it works very much the same under Ubuntu.

Oddly enough, Network Manager displays TWO entries for this Mobile Broadband modem. And trying to use the second one causes things to hang for about a minute or so. And even using the first one only works every three or four tries (have not been able to figure out why – it just claims that it can’t connect) – but it does work after a while and creates a connection. Simply keep trying.

Now comes the ugly part. Since there’s no client software, on Linux you need to magically go to the right site to top off your account. So bookmark https://mobilebroadbandaccess.o2.co.uk/index as that’s where you need to go (more or less all other addresses simply give you a Connection Refused – it might have been smarter to implement a redirect here, but who am I to tell O2 how to do their job.,,)

But if you think this was stupid, it gets even more brain dead from here. Depending on your credit card issuer you might get redirected to a different site to do online fraud protection – and in my case, that site was NOT on the white list and gave me once again a Connection Refused error, preventing me from completing the transaction.

O2′s setup is actively (and successfully) thwarting my attempts to give them money. They should get an award for that.

The only workaround I could figure out was to connect through some other means, purchase a “top it up” product and then restart the O2 connection and voilà things work nicely.

But of course you run into that same problem every time either your data limit or time limit for your pay as you go account is reached.

What an exceptional display of shooting your own foot…

Update: turns out that T-Mobile is selling exactly the same modem for their version of pay as you go mobile broadband (which is called “web and walk”). And their flavor creates a different challenge. You appear to have to connect to the USB stick once using their Windows tool before it is willing to work. The error messages vary (I tried a hundred different things), but once you connect to the modem with the Windows tool everything works as expected; you don’t even have to connect to the 3G network from Windows – just starting the “web and walk manager” application appears to do the trick.

If you want to be able to use both of them simply create two different profiles in Network Manager; one with m-bb.o2.co.uk as APN for the O2 stick and the other one with general.t-mobile.uk as APN for the T-Mobile one. The rest of the information can be the same: Number is *99#, username and password are irrelevant (but have to be set to something). If you name these two network connection profiles “O2″ and “T-Mobile” then Network manager uses these names when you plug in the USB stick – it can’t tell the two modems apart, so you need to do that manually when you connect – just click the corresponding entry in the Network Manager drop down.