Re: ANNOUNCE: Mobile Broadband Configuration Assistant

[Stefan Seyfried <seife suse de>]

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

> 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.

I count "most cards" as "cards in the wild", and basically, at least in
Europe, there is Option, Sierra Wireless, Novatel and Huawei in the market.

The problem of the unusable second port is not that bad since many Cards offer
a third port (the nozomis and most other option cards) that can be used and
the others could possibly be handled by a port multiplexer (see below).

>> 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.

Since Klaas will probably spend more time in America in the future, and he has
good contacts to the hardware manufacturers, the support in umtsmon for other
cards will certainly improve ;-)

>> 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?

That's userspace (you could put it into the kernel, but that would be totally
unnecesary).
There is an implementation over at berlios (the server seems down right now,
my bookmark points to http://developer.berlios.de/projects/gsmmux/) but i have
not tried it, simply because it is not too interesting to watch the signal
strength while being connected (and everything else like searching for other
providers etc. does not work while connected anyway). The search term you want
to google for is IIRC "GSM 07.10".

Regards,

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

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