jamie.lentin.co.uk

Huawei E220 & Three Mobile Broadband with Linux

Talking to the Modem

The device is initially a pretend CD-ROM so windows installs branded drives before the device proper is enabled. The device proper is just 2 serial ports, which most recent kernels should know how to reveal

Device monitoring

"Dialling up" to the internet

Despite the modem not really dialling the outside world, nor using PPP to connect to it, this is how we connect to the modem.

"10.11.12.13" woes

Talk of the faulty DNS servers that you occasionally get is all over the internet. This seems to be a modem quirk that pppd doesn't play along with. When initiating the PPP connection PC<->modem, the PC asks modem for DNS. Modem may not have fully connected by this point so returns 10.11.12.13, but also assumes that the PC asked for WINS entries too (probably because windows does). pppd ignores the modem- provided WINS servers, causing the modem to sulk & not continue the conversation, which would have revealed what the real DNS entries are.

Three (UK) network specifics

The support site here has various configuration values that can be mined out with random clicking, notably:-

APN:
3internet (NB: Not 'three.co.uk', although this will work, you get a NATted connection and different DNS servers. I think 'three.co.uk' is for mobile contracts)
APN user/pass:
both blank
SMTP server:
smtp-mbb.three.co.uk

And through usage the DNS servers seem to be:-

3internet APN:
4.2.2.3 4.2.2.4
three.co.uk APN:
172.31.140.69 172.30.140.69