Verizon/Novatel USB551L support?

[Jason Antman <jason jasonantman com>]

Hello,

I have a Verizon/Novatel USB551L 4G/LTE (with CDMA 3G fallback) that I'm 
trying to get working. I'm running Fedora 18 (kernel 
3.8.4-202.fc18.x86_64) with NetworkManager 0.9.8.0 and ModemManager 
0.6.0.0. With these versions the modem doesn't seem to get detected 
correctly. The only thing I can find about NM/MM and this device is 
commit 463de46e on April 17th of this year by Dan Williams, with a 
comment of "novatel: ignore USB551L / Just like the E362, which the 
USB551L is quite similar to." which adds the USB ID to 
forbidden_products for in mm-plugin-novatel.

I use KNetworkManager as a frontend, and when I plug in the device, it 
appears to be recognized but when I attempt to add a connection, my only 
option is "Installed CDMA Device". I've tried adding a CDMA connection 
with no luck, and NM (or at least KNM) doesn't seem to know anything 
about the LTE.

Does anyone have this device working? If not, devs, I can open a bug 
report and provide NM and MM debug output, lsusb, etc. My C skills are 
pretty poor (virtually nonexistent), but I'm willing to provide any 
assistance that I can to get this working properly.

Thanks,
Jason Antman