Telstra prepaid wireless broadband on Ubuntu 9.04

February 18, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

I recently bought a Telstra NextG prepaid wireless broadband pack and found some of the information for Ubuntu 9.04 on forums/blogs to be a bit out of date. Here’s my quick start guide:

If you plug in the MF626 modem it will default to USB storage mode and no modem will be detected. (This is to make installing drivers easy for Windows and OSX users.) On Ubuntu 9.04 the usb_modeswitch package is not available by default so one must compile and install it manually.

First make sure that you have the USB deveopment library:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libusb-dev

Go to the usb_modeswitch download page and get usb-modeswitch-1.1.0.tar.bz2 (or later).

tar jxf usb-modeswitch-1.1.0.tar.bz2
cd usb-modeswitch-1.1.0
make
sudo make install

With version 1.1.0 or greater you do not need to edit the usb-modeswitch configuration files as some guides suggest.

Restart. Disable wireless connections (right click the connection manager). Plug in the USB wireless modem, wait a bit, and a new connection wizard should pop up.

Configure the modem as Telstra – UMTS / HSDPA.

You should now be able to connect. It doesn’t ask for a password because all authentication is done via the SIM card.

If this doesn’t work, check the output of lsusb and make sure that a device appears with ID 19d2:0031. If you see a device with ID 19d2:2000 then the usb_modeswitch program has failed.

Todo: check balance and recharge: Whirlpool forum notes .

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