Re: ANNOUNCE: Mobile Broadband Configuration Assistant

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 09:13 +0200, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
> 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.

Let me rephrase this:  the interfaces to get the additional data _while
connected_ are mostly proprietary interfaces, with the exception of a
few Sierra cards, some Option cards, and some others.  So while you've
got PPP running, you simply can't send AT commands to most cards, even
if they do expose more than on USB serial port.

> 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.

Certainly not "almost all"...  UMTSmon doesn't support CDMA cards yet,
which rules out half of users in the Americas, most users in South
Korea, large numbers of users in China, and many people in Australia/New
Zealand.

> 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 :-)

That's interesting; would that be userspace or driver-side?

Dan