Cingular cellular using a Lenovo X200 and Ericcson F3507g built-in cellular modem

Background

Internet connectivity is necessary in this day and age, especially for an engineer at Sun! So, one day at my Father’s house I was playing with his Sierra Wireless USB dongle and not succeeding at figuring out what to do without internet (this might help for those with one), but I remembered my work Lenovo X200 had a Cingular capable WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) card.

Basic Solaris Implementation

So, I pulled the battery on the Lenovo and stuck the SIM card in from the Sierra Wireless dongle. From this point I fired up the Solaris Device Driver Utility (Applications->System Tools->Device Driver Utility or /usr/bin/python /usr/ddu/ddu.py). The DDU told me that the usbsacm driver was attached (actually twice and why, I’m not sure) which meant Solaris could talk to the card okay. To confirm I fired up tip(1) and typed ATZ which on a modem will usually give OK meaning all’s well and the modem’s ready to accept further commands to setup a data call. The Ericsson didn’t respond OK but instead ERROR, this required some digging…

Modem/PPP Setup

Since, the modem wasn’t in the right state to accept AT commands I looked around for what was up. The Ericsson F3507g has a offline and online mode. The command to bring the modem online is AT+CFUN=1 and sure enough the wireless modem light on the Lenovo lit up green (yes, AT+CFUN=0 turns it off again). This was a good sign!

Next, was setting up the files to run pppd(1). I usually use as a template, the instructions on the page for the OpenSolaris WWAN Project (see the “Configuration” heading). Here was no exception, however, I found that some things were going to be special for the Ericsson modem and Cingular. Thus I would have custom /etc/ppp/peers/evdo and /etc/ppp/evdo-chat files (and as it turns out a custom /etc/ppp/chap-secrets file). Indeed I did, they’re available below (to use also make a symlink for the modem to /dev/evdo — usually pfexec ln -s /dev/term/0 /dev/evdo):

• evdo-chat (goes in /etc/ppp)
• evdo (goes in /etc/ppp/peers)
• chap-secrets (goes in /etc/ppp)

Now all I have to do when I want to use the cellular modem is type pfexec pppd call evdo!

References:

• [ubuntu] [SOLVED] Setup and Configuration of Ericsson F3507g WWAN Card – Page 2 – Ubuntu Forums — Provided how to initialize the modem
• tecosystems » Meet Apone: The X301 Review (Linux and Vista) — How to use the cellular card as a GPS device
• AT command set for GSM Mobile Equipment — Provides insight into the AT+CFUN and AT+CGDCONT commands used to initialize the GSM modem