Vodafone Mobile Connect Card UMTS

Technical data

This card was designed by Option for Vodafone and is sold (at least) in Germany to UMTS customers. UPDATE: It is NOT a relabeled Option 3GlobeTrotter, it has a different design.

After plugging it into the CardBus slot, Linux detects it as a USB controller:

# lspci -v
[...]
03:00.0 USB Controller: OPTi Inc. 82C861 (rev 10) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
        Subsystem: OPTi Inc. 82C861
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
        Memory at d0300000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
# lspci -n
[...]
03:00.0 Class 0c03: 1045:c861 (rev 10)

After loading the usbserial module (big thanks to Kai Engert for finding out how) we get three USB serial links for free usage:

# modprobe usbserial vendor=0xaf0 product=0x5000
# ls /dev/usb/tts/
.  ..  0  1  2

I'm running pppd on /dev/usb/tts/0 right now, /dev/usb/tts/1 seems unusable and /dev/usb/tts/2 is still interactive.

Testing some AT commands...

First we connect to /dev/usb/tts/2 and just start out as always...

ATZ
ERROR

A ppp connection is open right now, so ATZ fails. The next thing we try is to get the product manufacturer, model and version:

AT+CGMI
Option Wireless Technology

OK
AT+CGMM
129

OK
AT+CGMR
2.4.4  (Date: Jan 15 2004, Time: 13:16:13)

OK

Now lets look into the Phonebook:

AT+CPBR=?
+CPBR: (1-200),32,18

OK
AT+CPBR=1,200
+CPBR: 1,"+49********",145,"**************"
[...]

OK

The first command receives the size of the SIM phone book (There are 200 entries), and with the second one I read all of them. I've ****ed out the phone number and the name for obscurity reasons only ;)

Thats pretty interesting, lets search for network operators (this one requires hanging up the modem!), get the current one and our signal quality:

AT+COPS=?
+COPS: (1,"Vodafone D2","Voda D2","26202",0),
       (1,"Vodafone D2","Voda D2","26202",2),
       (3,"E-Plus","E-Plus","26203",2),
       (3,"E-Plus","E-Plus","26203",0),
       (3,"T-Mobile D","TMO D","26201",0),
       (3,"o2 - de","o2 - de","26207",0),
       (3,"T-Mobile D","TMO D","26201",2),
       ,
       (0, 1, 3, 4),
       (0-2)

OK
AT+COPS?
+COPS: 0,0,"Vodafone D2",2

OK
AT+CSQ
+CSQ: 15,0

OK

I reformatted the first +COPS reply for better readability. UPDATE: According to the AT command set specs from 3GPP the +COPS contains the following elements in parenthesis:

mode (1 = manual; 3 = do not select)
long operator name
short operator name
operator number (countrycode + local number)
access technology (0 = GSM; 1 = GSM Compact; 2 = UTRAN (UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network))

The last two lines (separated by two commas) contain the supported modes and access technologies.

To be continued...

There are plenty of other AT commands out there, some of them didn't work (so I didn't mention them here), others might work when the modem is not busy. We will see...

UPDATE: There is also a HOWTO for the Swisscom Mobile UMTS, which is internally an Option Wireless Technology GT Fusion device.