Comments on: Three Mobile Broadband + Huawei E160G

By: jason

jason — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:34:26 +0000

I keep getting please check your settings but what settings do i check

By: pete willis

pete willis — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:18:24 +0000

sounds like this is a nifty little way of getting connected to the net. as much as i loathe “australia’s largest phone company”, unfortunately they do have the fastest and best coverage. i’m thinking of getting the modem through three, and most of the time use their account, but for times when network connectivity is limited on three, then getting a “T” (i hate using their full name) pre-paid or similar (even if if it ridiculously expensive). three told me that it costs about $100 to unlock the modem (or i’m sure there’s some other method)…..but my question is, will the E160G modem work (and give better speed) on the faster 7.2 network?

By: Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:44:44 +0000

Check the BIOS boot order, the E160G has a inbuilt MicroSD reader so your machine could be trying to boot from that instead of your hard drive.

By: csj

csj — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:30:19 +0000

When my E160g modem is connected to one of my PCs (XP, 2.1GHZ, 512MB RAM) Windows will not boot up past the POST BIOS stage. It will, however, boot up normally if the modem is unplugged. After starting XP, I can then plug in the modem, wait for it to be recognised, and carry on as normal. I have no such problems with any of my other 3 PCs (varying from 450GHz to 2.8GHz) in this freezing of XP startup with the modem connected. Does any one else have this problem and can they suggest a cure.

By: Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:52:32 +0000

Yes, i’ve experienced similar recently and i’m not even sure if you need usb_modeswitch as the kernel seems to pickup all endpoint devices quite easily.

/dev/ttyUSB0 is the main “AT style” port, where as I think USB1 is a pure data port. Not sure what the difference is but the majority of tools seem to use USB0 quite easily without any major modification.

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:45:11 +0000

Tinkered for a while, couldn’t get the E160G to work on my EeePC 900. The ttyUSB devices are created when the modem is plugged in, but there doesn’t seem to be useful communications taking place.

On a whim, I plugged the E160G into my trusty Fedora Core 5 laptop (this will actually be the machine I want to use 99% of the time as a backup router). I expected to have to use usb_modeswitch on this box, because the kernel is relatively old. However, on plugging the modem in, I got all of the ttyUSB devices. I had a script which I used for my old Merlin UMTS card on 3. As I have just replaced that account with the 3G modem, I took a punt and modified the script to use /dev/ttyUSB0, instead of /dev/ttyS0, and it worked first try, even with the same chat script (it’s a simple script that calls pppd (which uses chat to setup and dial the modem). So the E160G is going to be able to work where I want it.

By: Andrew Williams

Andrew Williams — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:49:30 +0000

For people looking for a setup guide, I’ve done some small documentation on getting this to work with Debian, the instructions will work for Ubuntu also:

http://tensixtyone.com/perma/howto-debian-lenny-huawei-e160g

By: Rob Staveley

Rob Staveley — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:29:00 +0000

Buoyed by this posting, I’m going to sign up with 3 and use this as a Broadband fall-back. I guess I’ll be setting it up and an alternative router.

Too bad they don’t have appliances to do this - using mobile as a fall-back when the ADSL drops out.

By: Emma

Emma — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:19:29 +0000

I bought one of these a couple of days ago and have only just managed to get it working. I was a righ pain to install on Windows XP.

It kept hanging while trying to install the modem drvers.

After doing some digging and much banging head against brick wall, found that this modem has trouble when there is cerain software installed, on the 3 website under the troubleshooting section, I had to uninstall Roxio CD creator before it would work.

Now it is installed, I don’t seem to be having any trouble, I’ve put some credit on it and the signal doesn’t seem to be too bad in my house, biggest test will be what its like when I travel with it

Catch ya later,
Emma.

By: Marius

Marius — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:44:35 +0000

Got an E160G on 3 (in Australia). It worked hapily for one day (on Vista Home Pro). Next day it would work for a few minutes, then stop. Have to unplug, plug in, re-install, then works for a few minutes again…