25th March 2009

 Having bought an O² Pay-As-You-Go mobile broadband dongle for £29.35, I thought it was time I tried it out on a Linux box. My experiments were done on my Acer Travelmate 290 laptop which is running Linux Mint 6. This Linux distribution is an Ubuntu variant, and can use all the Ubuntu software repositories.

The device itself is a Huawei E160, and luckily it is supported by recent Linux distributions. Getting it work turned out to be very simple once a few bits of information had been gathered from a few internet searches. The first thing, before doing those searches was to enter dmesg | grep usb into a terminal to find out if it had been recognised. It had !

usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3 usb 4-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice usbcore: registered new interface driver libusual usb 4-3: USB disconnect, address 3 usb-storage: device found at 3 usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4 usb 4-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice usb-storage: probe of 4-3:1.0 failed with error -5 usb-storage: probe of 4-3:1.1 failed with error -5 usb-storage: device found at 4 usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial usbserial: USB Serial support registered for generic usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic usbserial: USB Serial Driver core usb-storage: device found at 4 usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning usbserial: USB Serial support registered for GSM modem (1-port) usb 4-3: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0 usb 4-3: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1 usbcore: registered new interface driver option usb-storage: device scan complete

 One peculiarity that some early web searches warned about was that the device would usually show up as a mass storage device. (In Windows it is shown as a virtual CD). Fortunately it seems that Linux now digs a bit deeper, and finds the GSM modem as well. Now I knew that the device was correctly recognised it was time for some further research. The most useful web link I could find was this : http://forum.o2.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=13757

The essential information was how to edit Network Manager with the following information :-

Number *99#
Username o2web (thats an o for oscar not a zero)
Password password
APN m-bb.o2.co.uk (thats an o for oscar not a zero)

While this was essential information, there was some other work I had to do before I could enter this stuff. The first thing was to uninstall wicd (a rather nicer network manager that unfortunately does not handle mobile broadband connections [yet]), and replace it with "Network Manager" (that does handle mobile broadband connections). There is also a mobile broadband information file that is sueful to download using the package manager as well. It seems it is not 100% accurate - hence the reason to edit the connection configuration with the details I pasted above.

 One thing that is not obvious is that to edit the connection details you have to go to network settings, and choose the edit option there. One web page I read sugested that you could right click on the connections shown in the network manager on the task bar, and select edit from there. That didn't work for me, but I found network settings from the "start menu", and did the editing there.

 With all the information correctly entered I click on "connect", and basically nothing happened. The connection reverted to my WiFi connection. So I tried turning off the WiFi adapter, and without any further ado I found I was connected to mobile broadband. In a way that is good, and almost mimics O²'s Windows connection manager that automatically connects you to a "The Cloud" WiFi connection if one is available (which offers "unlimited" downloading - noting the special use of the word "unlimited" when used in conjunction with crooked internet service providers). However, until you realise what is happening it is rather annoying.

 For now I think that O² pay as you go mobile broadband, using the E160 dongle and linux, seems pretty good. It is cheap to get started (£29.35 to buy the dongle), but could be expensive if used a lot. (Details here). I think that 3 networks may do a better deal if their dongle is compatible with Linux, but unfortunately their website is either broken or does not work properly when using Firefox.