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User-friendly HSDPA connection using Option WWAN modem

Published on: March 7, 2009 | Last modified on: August 12, 2009

Some time agao, I have been given an Option Icon 225 WWAN USB modem (they are now distributed by most European DSL and mobile phone providers). Though I had managed to “make it work” without major issues, using the out-of-tree hso module, rezero and HSOconnect1.

Actually, to be able to get a working HSDPA connection, you need at least 3 things I will describe later. While all of them were no later than one month ago either not supported, or partially working, I am now able to get reliable and user-friendly HSPDA connections from my laptop.

Here is what I use, and the tips I have gathered to make things work.

The hso kernel module

This kernel module was first written by Option themselves, and published under the GPL license. It has been included into the Linux kernel since the 2.6.27 release.

The hso module in the kernel 2.6.28 is very reliable and it is what you should use.

ozerocdoff

ozerocdoff is the improved Option software for temporarily disabling ZeroCD and allowing the modem to be a modem.

Though it isn’t yet part of Debian, I have opened an ITP and have already worked on packaging it. You can temporarily get it from my experimental repository.

Don’t miss the patch applied so that hal detects the device as a modem.

A user-friendly GUI

That was the hardest part!

The only GUI I could find was HSOconnect, written by Paul Hardwick. It works great, and allow connections, but parts of the software (especially file permissions) are really bad. I sent last week a private email to Paul with my suggestions on how HSOconnect could be improved (including Debian packaging), but this email remains unanswered for now. I have however worked on better Debian packages for both HSOconnect and HSOlink – you can find this work in my personal SVN repository as follow:

These are not even experimental packages, but working on them has allowed me to test some of the suggestions made to Paul and prevented me from using the Debian packages distributed on Pharscape (hsolink package not available for amd64, there is no apt repository and I prefer checking the sources myself when not using official packages).

Then NetworkManager 0.7 was uploaded to Debian experimental. Support for mobile broadband connections has been added into this new major release. Unfortunately, this version did not work for me, but I hadn’t had the time to understand what could cause my issues, as NM was updated to 0.7.097 which worked perfectly well.
I just had to input credentials, even if my provider doesn’t need them, or NM “failed to authenticate”. I guess I should report this minor issue when I have some spare time.

My main concern with NM is that I had previous bad experience with this software, and have been using wicd with success for all this time. NM still has some missing features I hope to be be added in the future: no signal strength indicator, no possibility to count the data exchanged (some providers seem to invoice based on the volume exchange rather than on the connection time) etc.

My overall impression on this configuration is rather good. I have had the chance to setup similar devices at work on Windows, and it was really horrible: the software shipped by the mobile provider has to be installed each time the modem is plugged into a new usb connector!

  1. All of them are available from Pharscape website, but are not available in Debian. This website, run by Paul Hardwick, is unavoidable when you have an Option modem and use Linux. ↩