tensixtyone

I went to the post office and got my hands on the Huawei E160G with my reduced contract, and so far I am very pleased with it. The modem itself is a large USB stick, very comparable in size to a cigarette lighter. What is interesting is that the electronics can now be packaged in such a small kit, why ain’t they producing mobile phones of this size?

My first step was to get it working on Windows, I plugged in the modem on my old Windows PC and followed the numerous (and strange) online prompts to setup the software. After a lot of beeping, detecting new hardware and other jiggery pokery, I was presented with the Three Modem Manager application. The modem manager is a simple too that enables you to run the “dialup” connection through the modem. I whipped open the setup manual which informed me that no other setup was required bar setting up the software. So I clicked “Connect”…

… and it failed?

According to the tool I had to check my settings to see if they’re correct. This is a fresh setup of the tool, why would I need to check the settings when Three’s own guide mentions theres no setup needed. After 10-15 minutes poking around in the settings menu I finally threw in the towel. Sod it, I wanted to run this thing on Linux anyway so why am I putting myself through the pain?

Linux is, well, the way it was supposed to happen. I plugged in the stick and straight away I had numerous devices available, the “CD-ROM drive” for the drivers, the MicroSD reader, and the “tty” ports for the actual GSM modem. At this time I could of gone the route of setting up Gnome PPP and related tools to dialout to the provider and start using my new fancy net connection, but I’d heard that Network Manager 0.7 had the features to use 3G/GPRS built in without any extra settings. I decided to investigate the new version of Network Manager.

After much digging around on the ‘tubes, I finally found a Debian repository containing a build of the lastest Network Manager SVN. A little apt pinning and installation later I had the new version of the tool install. I browsed the existing menu and found a new option: “Auto connection to 3G/GPRS” , I selected the option and it connected.

I have to have a little moment to reflect here, “Mobile Broadband” is a new fad at the moment for most telecoms providers worldwide, so you would expect the Linux software support to be a little sketchy and buggy, but as it turns out the Linux method is alot simplier and easier to use. I’m not sure if I was missing anything obvious in Windows, but isn’t this stuff just supposed to work?

So, signed on to 3G I decided to give it a run for it’s money. I’m running these tests at 1:08am so it maybe a little bias, as I doubt many people would be actually using the APs at this time. I seem to be getting a variable speed of about 1-2mbps, and 150kbps upstream, not bad at all for a mobile provider. The documentation mentions that you should expect up to 2.5mbps, not the 7.2mbps advertised on some sites, all in all Three do a good job of pre-warning you that the speed on the box is not always what you get.

So far I’m happy with it, I’ve had a few minor issues with the stick not registering on the network but I’m not sure if this was down to my settings or just a small outage. I’ll post a guide in the next few days on configuring Debian up for Network Manager 0.7 and setting it up to work with the E160G.