Huawei E630

This guide is written for people who want to use their UMTS/HSDPA Card with Gentoo Linux. The first part of this guide will tell you what kernel options you will need to get the hardware working. The next part will be the configuration for the datacard to establish a ppp connection to your provider. In the explained case it's T-Mobile Austria.

Prologue
There are several tutorials about that card in the net. The card uses its own USB Controller, where the UMTS/HSDPA modem is connected to. The commands for this modem don't differ from other common modems with AT command set. That is the reason, why we can use common ppp connection tools (kppp).

Kernel configuration
To use this PC Card, see this guide. Because of the USB Controller OHCI is required. Furthermore USB to Serial converter for the Modem is necessary. To establish the PPP connection to the provider, ppp support also has to be enabled in the kernel,

Hardware detection
lspci should show the USB Contoller.

04:00.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 43) (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) 04:00.1 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 43) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])

In this case the controller uses OHCI for communication, other USB Controllers may work with the UHCI Protocol. The USB Device should show up as well,

Bus 006 Device 002: ID 12d1:1001

Bus 006 Device 002: ID 12d1:1001 Device Descriptor: bLength               18 bDescriptorType        1 bcdUSB              1.10 bDeviceClass           0 (Defined at Interface level) bDeviceSubClass        0 bDeviceProtocol        0 bMaxPacketSize0       64 idVendor          0x12d1 idProduct         0x1001 bcdDevice           0.00 iManufacturer          1 HUAWEI Technologies iProduct               2 HUAWEI Mobile iSerial                0 bNumConfigurations     1

If the card is correctly recognized there the usbserial module should create new tty devices:

/dev/ttyUSB2 /dev/ttyUSB1 /dev/ttyUSB0 This is your HSDPA Card. If this links aren't created you should try to load usbserial with this command:

Vendor and Product ID can be found by typing lsusb command After this operation links to usb should appear ind /dev/tts directory

Software
To initialize the card, enter the PIN code and login into the network, there is a small program on sourceforge which does that: Linux UMTS/GPRS command-line tool

Download that tool and install it by typing make and make install in the source directory.

To Log into the Network, show Homenetwork and Signal strength:

Trying list of devices SIM ready Waiting for Registration..(120 sec max) Registered on Home network: "23203",2 Signal Quality: 17,99

Ok, your card is ready, now you need to establish a PPP connection to your provider. This tutorial uses kppp, but you can use any pppd frontend you want. This is the tested configfile for kppp:

Don't forget to change the Access Point Name (APN) value on the InitString1=AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","gprsinternet","",0,0 line from "gprsinternet" to the actual Internet APN. If you don't know the Internet APN, ask your service provider.

Now you have to start Kppp and simply push on connect. If you haven't entered the PIN yet, a window pops up where you have to enter it. After that, the card gets initialized and the PPP connection gets established. In your panel you can see a little icon (world) which shows you the activity. By right clicking on it you can get the actual status of your connection and disconnect from the network.

This HOWTO should also work for Huawei E620 and E618 data cards, however with that card you may experience lock-ups after you insert and reboots after you remove the card. In that case, you have to get a newer hardware revision of the card.

You may need remove the wait for dial tone option which was causing pppd to die unexpectedly with exit status 1 KPPP > Configure > Modems > Huawei > Modem > Uncheck wait for dialtone before dialing