3G Mobile Broadband Internet

Supported Devices

• A600
• UTStarcom UM100C

Setting Up Cricket UM100C

This device "just works" in 9.04.

Setting Up Cricket A600 USB WiMax Device

Requires Ubuntu 9.04 to work

Credit goes here

These devices need to be activated on a Windows or MacOS machine before they will work on ubuntu. If the device needs to be activated after it gets to us, there is a machine with OS-X in mac land which we can use for activating. Just install the software package in OS-X, run the cricket program and when asked allow the machine to activate the device. The activation takes about 2 minutes, and may report (incorrectly) that it failed. Once the device is activated it should show the cricket wireless network inside of the program.

Once the device has been activated on another machine, connect it to the Ubuntu machine and run the fallowing in terminal:

wget http://freegeek.errtech.com/Cricket_Mode_Switch.tar.gz
tar xzvf Cricket_Mode_Switch.tar.gz
cd usb_modeswitch-0.9.7
sudo make install
chmod +x flipflop.sh
sudo ./flipflop.sh

The device will need to be activated with the flipflop script each time it is connected. To make things easier for the user you may wish to create a launcher on the desktop that runs this script (gksu ~/usb_modeswitch/flipflop.sh)

Once activated, the device will appear in network manager as "Auto Mobile Broadband (CDMA) conenction". When connected it will show up as a 'cell tower' icon.

Automate usb mode switching

Stolen from here It is possible to use udev to automate the switching of the Cricket A600 making it unnecessary to run gksu ~/usb_modeswitch/flipflop.sh every time the device is plugged in.

First you need to find the product id and vendor id of your usb device using lsusb (this should be 1f28:0020 for the A600 but it is a good idea to check). Also make sure that the usb device is in the mass storage mode otherwise it will report the wrong product id.

Bus 003 Device 009: ID 1f28:0020

Now that we have the usb ids we can go ahead and create our udev rule.

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/45-hotplug.rules

Copy the following to the 45-hotplug.rules replacing <YourDefaultProdID> with 0020, <YourDefaultVendID> with 1f28 and <YourPathToUSB_ModeSwitch> with the path to flipflop.sh.

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idProduct}=="<YourDefaultProdID>", SYSFS{idVendor}=="<YourDefaultVendID>", RUN+="<YourPathToUSB_ModeSwitch>"

You will need to restart the computer for this to take effect.