mobile broadband support

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 15:42 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> >> (I believe the answer is that the signal strength requires card-specific
> >> logic which isn't documented, so this isn't easy to implement)
> >>
> > I finally located an area in the wiki for this:
> >  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NetworkManager-MobileBroadband
> >
> >   "Signal strength while connected is not supported at this time because
> > most cards use proprietary protocols to retrieve signal strength while
> > connected."
> >
> > and this was for Fedora 9 release.  So maybe some work will happen for
> > Fedora 10 that would start to add signal strength display for these cards.
> 
> I think part of the problem is that you need two serial ports/control
> ports to be able to get signal at the same time as being connected and
> not all cards have the two ports to do that. There's umtsmon but I'm
> not sure it works at the same time as NetworkManager
> 
> http://umtsmon.sourceforge.net/

Unfortunately, umtsmon doesn't do CDMA devices.  So it won't work for
Gerry.

And further, the S720 is one of those cards that uses proprietary
protocols to deliver signal strength on the additional tty devices.  So
unless somebody figures out the protocol, or Novatel opens up the
protocol, you'll never be able to get signal strength out of the card
under Linux.

Recent Sierra cards, some Huwei, and most Option cards are able to
deliver signal strength using normal AT commands, which we'll support
soon in NetworkManager.  But for most old Sierra cards and most Novatel
cards, you are simply SOL.

Dan