Mobile Internet with 3 UK
It's surprisingly easy to set up mobile internet access on Linux for 3 UK. I am going to show two different options: using a Skyephone S2 via bluetooth and using a MF627 mobile broadband dongle. For both options I will be using wvdial to actually establish the connection, so let's start with the wvidal configuration file.
> /etc/wvdial.conf
[Dialer Defaults] Phone = Username = Password = New PPPD = yes [Dialer Skypephone] Init1 = ATZ Init2 = ATE0 V1 &D2 &C1 S0=0 +IFC=2,2 Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","three.co.uk" Stupid Mode = 1 Modem Type = Analog Modem ISDN = 0 Phone = *99# Username = three Password = three Modem = /dev/rfcomm0 Dial Command = ATDT [Dialer MF627] Init1 = ATZ Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","three.co.uk" Stupid Mode = 1 Modem Type = Analog Modem ISDN = 0 Phone = *99# Username = three Password = three Modem = /dev/ttyUSB2 Dial Command = ATDT
To use the bluetooth option, you first have to establish a bluetooth connection to your phone -- an easy way to do this is to use blueman for the basic bluetooth set up and to connect a "Serial Port" to the "Dialup Service". Once that's done you can establish the mobile internet connection using wvdial, e.g. "sudo wvdial Skypephone".
Connection via the MF627 dongle is quite similar, you only need to switch it into a mode where it represents itself as a USB serial port (after connection it usually appears as a CDROM device containing the driver software). The easiest way to do this is to "eject" the virtual CD which can easily be done on the command line via "eject" (you might have to specify the device to eject, e.g. "eject /dev/scd1")
Once that's done you can again use wvdial to establish the connection, e.g. "sudo wvdial MF627".
APN
The wvdial configuration file shown here uses three.co.uk as the APN which gives you a natted IP address. If you prefer to get a public IP address, you can change the APN to 3internet (although you can currently freely choose which APN to use, I guess the intention from 3 is to use 3internet for mobile broadband customers and three.co.uk for mobile internet access -- so I wouldn't be surprised if some restrictions will be put in place for the 3internet APN in the future).
3Pay SIM
Get a free 3Pay SIM with £2 extra credit (after an intial £10 top-up).
