emobile wireless Internet access with Linux 1

Posted by Michael 02/03/2009 at 14h19

emobile has a nice offer here in Japan: a wireless 7.2mbps Internet connection for a bit under 6,000yen a month. We are using the D02HW, a USB HSDPA/HSUPA (3.5G technology) modem, but the following probably also applies to some of their other devices.

To get it to run under Linux, using a modern distribution such as Mandriva, Ubuntu or Slackware, not much configuration is needed. When the device is plugged in, it should be recognized automatically and two serial devices, /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 are created.

The easiest method to get an Internet connection up and running is to use wvdial (usually part of your distribution). The configuration is relatively easy, you only need to edit /etc/wvdial.conf (as root) and add the following section:

[Dialer em]
Modem Type = USB Modem
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 460800
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATS0=0
Stupid Mode = on
Phone = *99***1#
Username = em
Password = em

The phone number, username and password are from the device's manual.

Once this is done, you can use "wvdial em" to connect to the Internet.

Tip: if you set the user s-bit on wvdial ("chmod u+s /usr/bin/wvdial" as root), you don't need to be root to successfully create the connection.

A note about emobile and configuration tools which come with your distribution:

  • Mandriva will try to configure the device as a "GPRS/Edge/3G" device using comgt, but that won't work correctly because this tool doesn't know emobile (yet, this is with v0.32).
  • Other distributions using the GNOME NetworkManager also might not be able to get you connected, at least with Ubuntu it was not successful.

More success / failure stories? Please feel free to post them here!

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  1. Bawdo 02/03/2009 at 15h26

    Hello there Michael,

    I have setup a simple udev rule for mine. That way after plugging the modem in and a short wait I’m connected without further adieu:

    KERNEL==”ttyUSB?”, SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”12d1”, ATTRS{idProduct}==”1003”, RUN+=”/usr/bin/ponE220 &”

    Since udev will run the script defined by RUN+= as soon as the device is detected I have created a simple bash script with a 3 second delay before connecting. This allows the device to “settle” before attempting to connect.

    !/bin/bash

    sleep 3

    /usr/sbin/pon E220