tensixtyone

People who use their Huawei E160G on Three will know that in the Windows client you can send and receive SMS, this will come at some minor cost of £0.10 per SMS, and you can add bundles onto your mobile broadband account to make this cheaper.

Similar functionality can be achieved in Linux, and it’s very useful if your like me and want to drop someone a message when you don’t have your phone around.

For this we’ll be using Gammu, which is a toolset for managing phones via the AT GSM command set. It was originally forked from Gnokii, which was a similar toolset for Nokia handsets. As the E160G opens a serial port with access to the AT command set this is a relatively easy tool to setup.

First of all, we need to grab the packages. As these are standard Debian packages you should have no issues.

# sudo apt-get install gammu

Next, we need to configure Gammu to pickup the correct device. Check your dmesg for the serial port:

$ dmesg|grep tty
[12321.308078] usb 5-3: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[12321.308275] usb 5-3: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1

Edit ~/.gammurc, or run gammu-config to change the device settings. Your ~/.gammurc file should look similar to:

[gammu]
port = /dev/ttyUSB0
model =
connection = at19200
synchronizetime = yes
logfile =
logformat = nothing
use_locking =
gammuloc =

Give it a test by getting all the SMS from the device:

# gammu getallsms

This should bring back all the SMS currently stored on the stick, which should include your login details for the Three website (unless you’ve deleted them). To send a SMS use the “sendsms” command:

$ gammu sendsms text 07874454543
Enter message text and press ^D:
Test Message!!!!!1!
Sending SMS 1/1....waiting for network answer..OK, message reference=2

Gammu has a lot more tools and options to explore, now you have the basic config you can setup a SMSD, which can expose the ability to send SMS to a network. Also, Gammu has a python interface so you can possibly build your own frontend client for sending SMS. For more details explore the Gammu Wiki.

At first, when the likes of Three and Vodafone released their “Mobile Broadband” services I was a little skeptical that it’ll be worth the money. 3G data is notoriously rubbish in the UK, either services are capped back to GPRS speeds or are heavily firewalled to make a “walled garden” of approved content. The premise is as follows, Three are starting to reduce their monthly cost in a attempt to get the customers in to back their massive HSDPA expansion in the UK, along with sites like Quidco offering interesting discounts on contracts and special half-price deals, it looks even better…

So I bought in.

On Wednesday I bought Three’s 5GB/month offer package through Quidco, which came to £7.50/per month and £12.50 cashback. For me, the 5GB limit is perfect as I doubt i’ll ever use over that amount in a monthly period. A few people have pointed me to similar packages on T-Mobile, but you can see just from a quick look in that list that the actual price is quite high for what you get, the only bonuses of that package would be the free T-Mobile wifi access (which theres alot of access points for in the UK) and the AUP style limiting, in that if you go over your limit you don’t get charged, you only get kicked up to the higher package if your a constant abuser.

So what’s the catch? Overage. Three charge you £1/per MB in overage, so a extra GB would cost you £1024. In today’s modern telecoms world that is an insane price, which again many people have pointed out to me. If you have no intention of using up to the bandwidth limit, what’s the issue?

Well, I got a useful Royal Mail red slip through the post yesterday, so I have to head down and pickup the equipment. Hopefully by the end of today I can give it a test and write down some more thoughts on it.