Today I bought a Virgin 3G USB dongle for internet access while on the road, and I thought I’d share the experience. It turns out I don’t need to write up the documentation because it mostly works out of the box, and the little bits I need to change are already well documented 🙂
First I looked at the Ubuntu 3G Hardware page to see what the best supported cards were. We already have our mobiles on Virgin, so I was pleased to see the default Virgin mobile Broadband device was supported, the Huawei E169.
When I plugged it in, I then created a new mobile broadband connection through the network manager. If I used all the defaults, and then selected the connection through Network Manager, it would ask for a password and fail.
So I followed the excellent instructions from the Ubuntu forums here to both disable chap from the /etc/ppp/options and edit my network managed mobile broadband connection with a few settings (the Virgin Broadband number and password, plus the changing of the name from the default VirginInternet to VirginBroadband) and within minutes it is working perfectly!
This configuration is on an EEEPC 1000H running Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) which is currently in beta, but looks great.
On Vodafone AU it was even easier. Just select the carrier (and that was Intrepid). Ubuntu win.
Debian by contrast was a pain and I ran out of patience :-(.
Yes, the 3G support in Ubuntu is brilliant. I use a ‘Three’ 3G USB key and different sim cards and it works with various providers. It’s really good.
hmm, still not working here – I’m on post paid and the user and password fields are blank. I edited a different profile and put in Virgin’s settings because the GNOME connection manager wouldn’t let me save a blank password, but its still didn’t help.
It just says “GSM network disconnected” immediately. And I assume by GSM they also mean W-CDMA / HSDPA / 3G.