Wireless broadband with a Mac

Recently i decided to try one of the new broadband offerings here in Sweden - a prepaid, unlimited wireless broadband connection with the mobile carrier 3 (www.tre.se).

At SEK 299 for one month of unlimited usage, it's a pretty good offer, and did I mention it's prepaid - no need for any subscriptions!

The USB modem that's included is a Huawei USB E220 with the latest firmware supporting download speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps.

The driver and application program for Windows is included in the modem, just insert the modem and the installation program will launch automatically.

However, for Mac users life isn't that easy. You need to download the latest driver, and for Mac OS X 10.5 it's just the driver, no application client is available. If your SIM-card asks for a PIN-code, there's no way to disable this with the Mac driver. The only solution is to first install the modem in Windows and then use the Windows client to disable the prompting for a PIN-code. Alternatively, insert the SIM-card into a 3G phone, and disable the PIN-code in the network settings of the phone.

Following the instructions it's pretty easy to configure the modem under network settings - basically you only need to enter "*99#" as the phone number and the correct APN address of your mobile network's access point, in my case "net.tre.se".

So, I was happy to be online and the first thing I did was to test my speed here in Södertälje, Sweden. Bredbandskollen reported 3.5 Mbps as download speed and 0.35 Mbps as my upload speed. More or less what I could hope for ... so far, so good!

Next, I decided to start a movie torrent using Transmission. I was happy to see that the download started and soon also with a decent speed. And this is where all hell broke loose ...

First, I noticed that the processor activity on my Macbook Pro went through the roof. In Activity Monitor I could see that a process "kernel_task" took about 50% of the CPU power, and another process "syslogd" took another 20%. This was at the same time as the torrent was downloading with speeds of about 300 Kbytes/s. Hmm, not good, this modem seems to be processor hungry, way too much if you intend to download large files only using your battery power.

Before I've had time to analyze the situation, the connection abruptly went dead. Completely dead! However, the light on the modem was still glowing, but no connection to the internet anymore. It didn't help to disconnect the modem, I had to physically remove the modem from the USB and re-insert it again, in order to get my connection back.

Needless to say, I tried to continue downloading the same torrent several times and the same thing happened each time, the processor activity shot up, and after a while the connection went dead!

Next, I did the usual thing, I typed google.com into my browser and went hunting for a solution.
(Here I should mention that during normal web browsing, the Huawei E220 USB modem seems to perform pretty good, it's only under stress that the above-mentioned symptoms occur).

I soon found out that the Mac-drivers Huawei provide, basically are crap, it doesn't matter what Huawei model you are using. Still, I couldn't accept this easily, after all, I had paid SEK 895 for the modem and the SIM-card.

So, next I installed the latest Mac-drivers for Mac OS X 10.5 from Huawei's web site, but the same thing happened of course, under stress the modem goes banana!

This meant I had a wireless, mobile broadband solution that worked for casual web browsing, but not for more demanding tasks, like heavy downloads or streaming of music.

I decided to reserve the Huawei for use exclusively on my other notebook running Windows XP, and went shopping for another modem for my MBP. I've seen some good reviews about wireless modems from Option, that uses chips licensed from Qualcomm, and I found a nice one, the Option Globesurfer Icon 225.

Black and sleek, not much bigger than a regular USB stick, and with supposedly good Mac support, I thought I couldn't go wrong. Oh, boy, was I wrong!

The installation was smooth, with Mac-drivers included on the modem and a client program (Globetrotter Connect) as well. So I was able to connect right away, but at the same time my Airport connection disappeared!!!

Yes, the Option Globetrotter application hi-jacked my Airport, and I couldn't turn it on again. I tried to disconnect the modem and then connect to my Airport, it didn't work. I removed the modem from my computer and tried to connect to my Airport. It didn't work. Finally, I uninstalled the whole driver/application crap from my harddisk, and presto, Airport was back and connected to my home network right away!

At this point, I was pretty pissed off, to say the least. Now I had two expensive wireless USB modems, that didn't work with my Macbook Pro. On my Windows machine both modems worked flawlessly, but I really wanted a mobile solution for my Mac!

Before I uninstalled the crappy Option driver from my MBP, I tested it though, also with some big downloads that would stress the modem, and I was glad to see that the problems I had with the Huawei E220 modem didn't appear with the Option Globesurfer Icon 225. But I simply can't accept not to have access to my Airport Base Station and my Airport Extreme while I use the modem!

At least I knew that the modem could be useful as long as I could locate a decent driver that worked with the network settings of my Mac.

And yes, I finally found that driver, included in the software launch2net from Nova Media in Germany.

This piece of software/driver is awesome, the Option Icon 225 is now working beautifully, I have Airport access, I can download huge files for hours without a hiccup, no excessive processor usage, just a stable, fast internet access! Thanks guys behind this software!

I haven't tested it with the Huawei E220 yet, for now I'm just happy to have a working connection, and to tell the truth, the Icon 225 is so sleek and sexy, so I intend to keep it with my MBP and only use the Huawei with my Windows notebook.