Re: ANNOUNCE: Mobile Broadband Configuration Assistant

[Stefan Seyfried <seife suse de>]

Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-04-10 at 07:08 -0700, Michael wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a Verizon broadband card and my experience has been that the
>> card acts as a modem.  I also use Fedora 7 and setting up the device
>> in the Network applet as a modem allows NM to control the card as a
>> dial-up connection.  The specific card support is still required from
>> the Verizon software to program the card for specific stuff (tower
>> info, other programming - SPL).  Although it would be nice to have
>> some kind of signal strength meter...
> 
> Unfortunately, the interfaces to get this additional data are all
> proprietary vendor interfaces, with the exception of a few Sierra GSM
> cards that accept AT commands on the second tty.  So this is not
> currently possible without licensing the SDKs of each vendor and using
> non-free, binary blobs.

Sorry, but that's simply not true (to not call it FUD or BS).
Almost all cards work just fine using UMTSmon (http://umtsmon.sf.net). Klaas
is acquiring those cards that don't right now and then they will work, too.

The only thing that is still needed is a port multiplexer for single-port
cards like my novatel xu870, but there was just no pressing need for having
signal strength while being connected, so i did not yet look into that :-)

-- 
Stefan Seyfried
R&D Team Mobile Devices            |              "Any ideas, John?"
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nürnberg | "Well, surrounding them's out."

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