The Daily ACK

I've just dropped the HSDPA dongle I've had on loan into a prepaid envelope to return the hardware to 3, so I thought I'd better write up my experiences with it now while it's still on my mind...

After some initial teething troubles I got the dongle working under OSX on my Intel Macbook, and gave it a fairly thorough work out over the course of the last couple of months.

As can be seen from their rollout map, 3 doesn't yet have any HSDPA coverage down here in the South West. Locally then, I'm suffering under the same sorts of problems I had with 3's Skypephone. The places where there isn't any 3 coverage is rather long; my house, my office, the cities and towns I visit regularly. The list of places where there is coverage is considerably shorter, and that's bad. What this also implies is that the problems seen with HSDPA when on the fringes of coverage are perhaps more significant than you might think.

However, whether a wireless modem works when you're in your own living room isn't, perhaps, as relevant as how well it works when it isn't. I used it extensively when I was out in Italy for the Trieste meeting roaming onto the 3 network there, and if I hadn't had the dongle on loan, I'd have only have been paying UK rates to do so...

I've also made use of it on various trips up and down the country, while stuck in hotel rooms, on trains and in coffee shops. I found it to be a good backup if wireless wasn't available. That said, performance was noticeably more sluggish than wireless, and if wireless access was available I generally still ended up paying for that rather than using the dongle.

Because somewhat unfortunately I found the process of using the dongle klunky and inconvenient. Coverage wasn't always there, and when it was there it wasn't there automatically. If I wanted to make use of it I had to dig the dongle out of my bag, plug it in, wait for it to find the 3 network, then wait for it to connect, wait for authorization. A lot of waiting...

I think I would have found the process a lot less inconvenient if HSPDA was built-in to my laptop, and like WiFi, automatically connected to a network when one was present. I'd like my data connection to seamlessly switching between wired, Wi-Fi and HSDPA when needed, without having to do do any fiddling around. Which I why I found the Dell and Vodafone announcement earlier today so interesting. You have to wonder how well integrated Vodafone's HSDPA card and Dell's mini 9 are going to be?

Three blew the roof off the mobile data market late last year when then started offering flat rate mobile broadband. Except of course it's not unlimited, their biggest plan has a data allowance of 15GB a month for £30. Which by mobile network standards is pretty good going. But despite the fact I wasn't paying for the bandwidth I found myself obsessively checking how much of the data allowance I was using, and the days where that's acceptable to me are long gone...

So the question I'm asking myself is "what's it for"? With a 15GB per month allowance this would never replace my home ADSL connection, I'd blow through that within the first week. So this is strictly for when you're out of the house, and the office, traveling. Perhaps this isn't normal, but most of the traveling I do is to the US. I don't spend much time in Europe, and less time than that traveling around the UK. Which means that I'd be paying £3 per MB when roaming, which clearly is just totally unacceptable.

So perhaps what I'm really saying here is that for me, this isn't the solution. Even when in Europe, and paying 10 pence per MB rather than £3 per MB, it isn't really good enough. However if you do most of your traveling in the UK, or within the coverage of a 3 sister network, perhaps you should take a look. It could be well worth your while.

As always then, your mileage may vary...

So if you've been keeping up you'll know I have one of Three's new HSDPA USB modems on loan for review, and that I'm also currently out in Italy.

After sorting out some teething troubles, the SIM card I have didn't come pre-activated for international roaming since it's a trial account, I've been using it fairly heavily. There is actually good coverage out here in Trieste, better in fact than I've seen in the UK in the past. Transfer speeds are pretty good, it's only noticeably slower than WiFi when you hit something like Google Maps which is heavy with AJAX and dynamic content.

I have stumbled across one problem though. Interestingly, it looks like the email I'm sending when connected through the dongle is getting black holed by the SpamCop, SORBS and NJABL lists.

Looking at the SpamCop entry for the pool address I was using it has been listed 17 times for a total of 69.4 days in the last 71 days. Most the other IP addresses in the same block have also been listed. In other words, it looks like a lot of Three's dynamic IP pool is listed as a source of spam.

That's bad news. Certainly anyone who sent me email that got flagged as coming from an IP address which is on one, or in this case more than one, real-time blackhole list stands a poor chance of me ever actually seeing the message unless they're on my mail client's white list. Since my white list basically consists of my boss and my wife, and not necessarily in that order, it's unlikely that will help them that much.

Of course I can work round the problem by connecting to my work's VPN, which means that to the world it'll look just as though I'm sitting back at my desk in Exeter. However, not everyone has that option. While black listing addresses in dynamic IP pools isn't entirely without controversy, it's fairly common practice. It looks like Three needs to clean house...

If you've been following along, you'll know that I currently have one of Three's new HSDPA USB modems on loan for review, and up till now I've been having problems getting it to work under OSX Tiger on my Intel Macbook, although I did get it working under Leopard on my PPC iMac without a hitch.

Well today I had a call from Three's technical support team, and from the sounds of things I was talking to the same Bangalore based team as you'd normally end up talking to if you'd managed to fight your way through the front line call centre people and got a call back from a real technical support person. I was pleasantly surprised, the agent at the end of the phone rapidly ramped their level of technical support from "...and have you tried plugging it into a different USB port?" to talking about the Kernel protection faults and driver conflicts.

The short story is that I now have a working USB modem, and am a happy geek with a new toy. The long story is, well, longer...


Now configured and connected to the Internet
It turns out that I having the configuration problems Aaron Heath was having, but with my own unique spin on things. The initial network driver configuration was indeed failing, because I had turned on the "Require password to unlock each secure system preference" option under the security options in my System Preferences. This meant that Three's proprietary connection software didn't actually have the permissions it needed to add or configure the new network interfaces. We actually accidentally stumbled across this during the tech support call when I plugged the dongle into the laptop while I had the Network Preference pane open and unlocked and it automatically enabled the HUAWEI Mobile device. From there we more or less followed Aaron's walkthrough to manually configure the network interface...


...and it shows up in the normal modem menu
The modem now shows up under the normal Mac drop down for such things, and I can connect to the Internet using it without a hitch from my Intel Macbook using the standard Mac tools. However, and perhaps somewhat tellingly, I still can't use the proprietary Mobile Connect application included with the dongle. It crashes, a bit further forward this time, but still with a Kernel Protection Failure...


The Mobile Connect application still doesn't work though?
Of course this doesn't really bother me, I'd rather use the device using the default tools anyway. However, without the Mobile Connect application, I do need a new way to monitor my bandwidth usage. I might not be paying for my packets while I have the dongle, but I'd like to be able to report back at the end of my trial with how much it would have cost had I actually had to pay for things. Especially since I'm off to Trieste in a couple of weeks and will be using the dongle to roam onto Three's Italian partner network, which could get interesting price wise.

It was surprisingly hard to find a simple, free, application that would just monitor my total bytes up and down on a specific network interface, until I stumbled across the oddly named SurplusMeter, which does exactly what I need, monitor ongoing usage against a preset bandwidth allowance.


Annoyingly there isn't any way of getting rid of the mounted volume on the dongle.
Which leaves me with my final annoyance, every time you plug in the dongle it mounts the partition with the driver software on it. This was actually rather nice the first time I plugged the stick into the computer, but now it just leaves me with an extra mounted volume cluttering up an already over full desktop. I'm not going to muck around with it right now, but after I've tested the dongle, and I'm back from Trieste, I might have a play around with Disk Utility and see if I can stop it doing that and still have access to the modem itself.

Anyway, as it turns out, this post is brought to you via mobile broadband and Three's dongle. I'd forgotten to plug my ethernet cable back into the laptop after taking the screen shots for the post....

Well it's been a week since I received one of Three's new HSDPA USB dongles on loan for review. They're probably regretting sending it to me...


Because this isn't a review, and it doesn't look like I'll be giving one. After a week in my company the dongle is still sitting in its box on the shelf. I still haven't managed to get it to work with my Intel Macbook which, despite claims of support, seems to be due to problems with the connection software and OSX Tiger.

Interestingly I have tried the dongle with my old PowerPC iMac, which is the only machine I have on my desk right now running Leopard, and unlike my laptop, which is still running Tiger, it works without any problems...


On first connection Three's software creates a HUAWEI Mobile network device, and oddly two more unconfigured devices; DIAG and PCUI
Not that my desktop was in need of mobile broadband, but the dongle does connect to the Three network successfully, creating a HUAWEI Mobile network device which, despite my previous complaints, does actually show up in the normal modem drop down menu. So it looks like there is no need to touch the proprietary connection software after your first connection to the network...

Having seen the software actually working now it looks to me as if, under Tiger, the problem is that it's not correctly updating the network devices list the first time it attempts to use the device.

In summary, if you're running OSX Tiger I'd advise steering clear of Three's new mobile broadband dongle because there seems to be some serious software problems. However if you're running OSX Leopard, or Windows come to that, it's likely you'll be okay.

However as I am running Tiger, unless I can resolve the driver problems, I'm pretty much at a dead end. As always of course, you mileage may vary...

Update: From the screen shot it looks like it is possible to get 3's dongle working under Tiger. Milage, as always, does seem to vary...

Update: After manually configuring the network interfaces, the dongle is now working.

I was recently offered on loan one of the new HSDPA USB sticks from the UK network operator Three under a similar deal, which is I promise to write about it, to the Skypephone I had on loan from them at the tail end of last year. The stick arrived this morning...


I'm off to the IVOA Interop Meeting in Trieste next month, and Three are one of the few mobile operators with decent roaming rates, at least if you're in a country covered by one of Three's sister networks which are: Austria, Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy or Sweden. Which I will be, so it's all rather well timed...


Opening the box you find a USB stick, a cable and a SIM card. You have to insert the SIM card into the stick, and the stick into your laptop. The hardware setup therefore isn't that hard. I'm on a Mac and plugging the stick into my Macbook made the stick mount a partition with the driver software in it, double click to install and theoretically we're good to go...

The initial bad news is that the connection software doesn't use the default OSX utilities. The modem doesn't show up in the normal Internet Connect application, nor does it turn up in the modem status pull-down menu in the menu bar along with my Bluetooth and wired modems. What it does do is tread heavily over my root file system and install various bits and pieces onto the disk. It also installs a proprietary MobileConnect.app into my root Applications folder. Which doesn't make me that happy. None the less we're good to go...


Except that it doesn't work, firing up the proprietary connection software it finds the dongle without a problem, and I appear to have signal. Hitting connect I'm asked for my admin user name (why does it do that?) and then... connection failed.

There are interesting things going on in my system log file, but the application itself doesn't seem to create its own logs so its difficult to tell what's happening. But what seems to happen when you hit connect is that the SetNetworkConfig call crashes due to Kernel protection failure. In other words, bad things happen.

Which is where I am now, I'm about to email technical support with my crash dump and I'll let you know how I get on when they get back to me...

In the mean time you should probably head off and read the interesting BBC News article on why these dongles are so important to Three and why, after initially being a strong supporter of walled gardens, like most people they realised that these are not really a good thing...

Update: Works under Leopard, but not under Tiger?

Update: After manually configuring the network interfaces, the dongle is now working.