Subforge

I recently bought the prepaid UMTS stick from Tschibo as a backup and mostly for mobility. After unpacking it I discovered it's the Huawei E160 which is generally the same as the E220. It just comes with an additionally USB cable and a micro SD-card reader - which causes just trouble: You will need USB_ModeSwitch to change the device from card reader mode to modem. Otherwise you will have a cdrom - no don't ask.

Asking Google about linux and UMTS will lead to lots of wiki and forum entries, but most of them had one thing in common for me: They usually don't work.

Common solutions first, I tried umtsmon which is really odd. Only available for Qt - too bad, it freezes shortly while doing stuff - worse, it doesn't work for me - next!

Next suggestion is using NetworkManager whis utilizes a server/client concept with fancy applets that can't find my stick - out of question.

The harder way is to use wvdial directly - let's go for it. The tricky part is the config and the right/order of the AT strings. After reading some non-working examples I came up with a solution that works:

 1 [Dialer Defaults]
 2 Phone = *99#
 3 Username = o2
 4 Password = o2
 5 Stupid Mode = 1
 6 Carrier Check = no
 7 Dial Command = ATDT
 8 Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
 9 Baud = 460800
10 Init2 = ATZ
11 Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
12 ISDN = 0
13 Modem Type = Analog Modem
14 Init5 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","webmobil1";

If you don't use the Tschibo stick you will probably change in the Init5 line the webmobil1 to something your ISP uses. Also phone needs sometimes to be changed to *99***1#.

Additionally if your card still wants a PIN add this to your config:

1 Init1 = AT+CPIN=YOUR_PIN

Finally just fire up wvdial and it should work!