[Bug 334122] Re: Mobile broadband connections fail to connect

[James]

Hi

Stumbled on this bug report after going thru hell trying to connect
using Three Australia Mobile Broadband on an unlocked E220 dongle using
Karmic. The dongle comes from Austria and was working out of the box on
Jaunty via BOB Breitband.

Based on on my investigations and digging around it would seem that the
issues I was presented were due to incorrect/missing DNS server settings
and/or dodgy firmware.

Prior to a firmware upgrade I was able to use nm-applet and force the DNS to the free opendns addresses. It worked but was slow, and heck nm-applet just looks rather ugly when in a KDE setting. I read about others having some issues and found this link: http://www.mobilebroadbandrocks.com/e220-72mbps-firmware-version-11117100200
I booted up a Windows box and flashed the E220 with the Maxis firmware (see link further down in that page) and the 'dashboard'. I set up the account on XP and was able to connect with no problems using the opendns DNS addresses.

Plugged the device back into KDE after reinstalling plasma network
manager, set up the account again under "Mobile Broadband" and
connected. The device was able to connect and I was able to browser
around a few sites, after entering the APN and Number.

So, I'd suggest for those having trouble with the E220 (can't speak for other devices) is :
* check your firmware - it may be old and faulty
* flash the new one if it is old, on a Windows machine
* test connection on Windows
* try and connect in KDE
* tail /var/log/daemon.log to get hints on what's going wrong, if needed
* check your provider's DNS is good (browse by an IP address)

Finally, unfortunately, the KDE Network Manager doesn't allow
specification of alternate DNS servers - so we're stuck with the ones a
provider supplies (in my case they are flaky). Nm-applet allows DNS
specification so it's obviously possible.

Hope that helps someone out there!

Packages:

Package: plasma-widget-networkmanagement
New: yes
State: installed
Automatically installed: yes
Version: 0.9~svn1029786+ag1-0ubuntu1

$ aptitude show plasma-widget-network-manager
Package: plasma-widget-network-manager
New: yes
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 0.9~svn1029786+ag1-0ubuntu1

-- 
Mobile broadband connections fail to connect
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/334122
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