Getting a T-Mobile 3G Mobile Broadband Dongle to Work on Snow Leopard
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Pigeon-holed in “Technology”
As Ant asked me this week, and I was going to tell him how I did it, I will share here the trick to getting a T-Mobile 3G broadband single to work on Snow Leopard.
Note, I can only vouch for the E180 model of modem. and though it shouldn’t really matter, a 2006 MacBook.
Since Snow Leopard came out, people have been struggling to get a working Internet connection. T-Mobile have not (as of October) updated their Web’n'Walk software, so it’s a case of a hack for the timebeing. Thankfully it’s incredibley simple.
You probably have already discovered that the minute you plug in the dongle, the software attempts to loads then just quits and claims it’s hit an error and crashed.
In fact, this isn’t a problem with the connection software at all, it’s just the auto-launcher software which is failing and you’ll hopefully discover that if you ignore this and simply delve into your Applications folder, find the T-Mobile software folder, you will happily be able to launch and connect as you had been able to before.
It’s not particularly obvious because it’s very hard to tell that there is this intermediate auto-launch software managing the main application and it took me a while to figure that out.
However, there is one caveat. This worked for me because I upgraded from Leopard - the drivers were already installed. I cannot vouch for this technique if you did a clean install of Snow Leopard or are working with a brand new Mac
Andy’s a star for writing this up, but unless you’ve done an upgrade from Leopard (or Tiger, or whatever) to Snow Leopard, there’s a very good chance that this won’t work.
However, that said, as Andy rightly points out, it’s the auto-launch software that is causing the problem and the pesky software on the stick that you don’t actually need which causes the issues.
There is a way around it though, which I’ve found mostly by accident and by tinkering around with what’s on the 3G stick’s handy read-only disk image.
When you plug your 3G USB modem in, it’ll pop up with the disk image, containing the web’n'walk software or installer. Don’t double click the installer.
Instead, Command-Click or right click the web’n'walk stick manager and then click “Show Package Contents”. Inside here, go to Contents then Resources and then you should see “Mobile_Connect_Drv_App.pkg”, which is the package that installs the drivers. Double click it and let it install the drivers. It will also install the web’n'walk stick manager to your Applications folder. You can safely delete that after it’s done so.
Remove your 3G USB modem and then restart your system, at least once (I had to restart twice before it would pick up the kext that it’s installed). Once you’ve done that, plug your 3G USB modem back in - Snow Leopard should now display the “network interfaces found” pop up and take you to the Network System Preferences pane.
Set up a new configuration for your newly found device (use the the HUAWEI configuration) and, if you’re on T-Mobile, simply put *99# in the number - you don’t need a username or password, it should just work.
This has worked for me, but your mileage may vary!