HSDPA/UMTS/GPRS on OSX
Last week I got myself a new gadget. As I am traveling quite a bit lately I bought myself a 3G modem. The Huawei E220 is what most of
the popular carrier sell here in Germany …and what fortunately seems to work quite well with OSX. I found myself the T-mobile “web’n'walk box” on ebay. (Why they
always have to re-brand these things is beyond me!) The drivers for the Huawei came on the CD. You got to install them first. Then disable the pin check on your SIM card. (I got myself a
multicard for that. That essentially means I have one card for my phone and one for the modem. Same number, same bill) Then you need to setup the modem as you would do for a bluetooth
modem. Pick the correct modem script and make sure to put the APN as the phone number(!). For my O2 account that’s “surfo2″. (See the screenshots for my settings) Another option that provides some more features is launch2net. Unfortunately with 75 EUR it is quite pricey for what it does.
At this stage I don’t have a dedicated data plan. There are a couple (real and not so real) flatrates available already. I wanted to see first whether it’s really worth paying a monthly rate. If you are also on O2 Germany make sure you switch to the time, NOT the volume based billing. That gives me a rate of about 5 EUR per hour. Otherwise you might have to declare bankruptcy after just a little bit of normal internet usage.
When the little LED on the modem turns blue you got UMTS. Speed is really OK and very usable most of the time. Problem is coverage though. I was mainly hoping to get some online time on the train route Berlin-Göttingen-Frankfurt. But for O2 the coverage still seems quite bad. Only around the big cities you got the high speed internet access and the GPRS fallback is barely useful for normal work. So frankly speaking it probably makes more sense for most people to search for the next free wireless hotspot. But at least I now have another option if there isn’t.