Harsh J

Just discovered that the BSNL’s 3G service seems to be sharing IPs between different accounts or uses a common identification point of some sort (look, look, a network newbie! Is the word a gateway?).

Couldn’t download anything off rapidshare/megaupload during its night usage periods due to the same. Sigh, at least you people don’t know of certain other file sharing services. OTOH, still serving me good speeds.

Anyone know how to disable the auto-dns (usepeerdns) options of wvdial on ArchLinux?

My fixed-line broadband ISP BSNL has this new limited period offer where-in they offer doubled speeds for all existing and new customers of almost any plan of choice – Unlimited or Limited. Of course it comes with that famous death star symbol in its announcement (*).

The first is that the offer is valid only from April 1st to April 30th. The second is that you get half of the doubled speeds.

This article shall detail the steps to setup, configure and begin using the Huawei E156 HSDPA (3G) USB Stick on Linux (fondly called by them BSNL employees as a ‘Data Card’).

On Windows, one generally uses the bundled ‘Huawei Mobile Partner’ software which does wonderful things like read messages, compute statistics, etc. There isn’t a similar software on Linux providing all of those under one roof, however.

First off, you need to create a BSNL 3G dialer profile, and you would require a software known as wvdial. Install it by either of these commands, in the Terminal application:

# On Ubuntu
sudo aptitude install wvdial

# On ArchLinux
sudo pacman -S wvdial

Now as root (or using sudo), open the file: /etc/wvdial.conf

# If you use GNOME, try:
sudo gedit /etc/wvdial.conf

# If on KDE, try:
sudo kwrite /etc/wvdial.conf

Paste into your editor, the following lines:

[Dialer bsnlnet]
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Phone = *99#
ISDN = 0
Baud = 460800
Username = " "
Password = " "
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = at+cgdcont=1,"ip","bsnlnet"
Stupid Mode = 1

Save the changes and close the editor. Now to get connected, you have to ask the wvdial command to start a particular connection. So simply do, on each startup:

wvdial bsnlnet

And lo, you’re online with blazing 3G speeds!

Note: You may be supposed to use a different APN like bsnlsouth sometimes (instead of bsnlnet or etc.), so change that in the highlighted line.