Reliance/TATA Broadband data card on Linux – Prof Prabhat Ranjan’s Blog

I am going to collect my past postings and new findings related to using Reliance/TATA Broadband card on Linux here. Here is a posting of mine from rimweb.in in Nov 2009:

“I have tested two Reliance Broadband card on offer right now for connectivity on Linux. I have tested this on Fedora 11 and it uses Linux 2.6.29 Kernel.

1. Huawei 1261 card – Works right away – once you insert it, it gets recognized as a USB device connected to one of the ports as a serial device. You can use normal RConnect package for Linux with slight modification for device name to make it work. On older version of Linux kernel, this may get recognized as a storage device and one may have to use usb_modeswitch to put it into modem mode.

2. LG LXU 800 – For this card, I had to insert usbserial module with vendor and device number as follows to get it to work.

#modprobe -r usbserial
#modprobe usbserial vendor=0xeab product=0x9357

Now insert the device and look at the /var/log/messages file or use “dmesg” command to see, if it gets attached to a serial device.”

yesterday I again had to try using a new Broadband Data Card from Reliance. It is from ZTE (Probably ZTE 2726). If you insert this in USB drive, you get the following message from Kernel on FC11 running Kernel 2.6.32:
=====
Aug 27 17:05:00 ranjan kernel: usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
Aug 27 17:05:01 ranjan kernel: usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=19d2, idProduct=fff5
Aug 27 17:05:01 ranjan kernel: usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Aug 27 17:05:01 ranjan kernel: usb 2-2: Product: USB Storage
Aug 27 17:05:01 ranjan kernel: usb 2-2: Manufacturer: ZTE, Incorporated
Aug 27 17:05:01 ranjan kernel: usb 2-2: SerialNumber: 000000000002
Aug 27 17:05:01 ranjan kernel: usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Aug 27 17:05:01 ranjan kernel: scsi13 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Aug 27 17:05:06 ranjan kernel: scsi 13:0:0:0: CD-ROM ZTE USB Storage FFF1 2.31 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
Aug 27 17:05:06 ranjan kernel: sr1: scsi-1 drive
Aug 27 17:05:06 ranjan kernel: sr 13:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 5
Aug 27 17:05:07 ranjan kernel: sr1: CDROM (ioctl) error, command: Xpwrite, Read disk info 51 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00
Aug 27 17:05:07 ranjan kernel: sr: Sense Key : Hardware Error [current]
=====

The way to get this to work is to use usb_modeswitch available at

http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/

usb_modeswitch is not much easier to use and comes with support for large number of USB data modem having mass storage built in. Unlike earlier version of this, here you just need to install software package and its data package and it works all by itself:

Download

(1) http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/usb-modeswitch-1.1.4.tar.bz2 (or its newerversion, if available)
(2) http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/usb-modeswitch-data-20100826.tar.bz2 (or newer version)

Install these after extracting by using “make install” command. You have to make sure that you have ‘tcl’ package installed. You have to also make sure, you have libusb-devel package or its equivalent installed for successful installation. Once you install, your device would get detected as a DATA Modem and you can use it to connect to Internet.

Author: Prabhat Ranjan

Prof. Prabhat Ranjan is Vice Chancellor, D Y Patil International University, Akurdi, Pune. He was heading India's Technology Think Tank, TIFAC(tifac.org.in) as its Executive Director since April 2013 to April 2018. Earlier he was Professor at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute for Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar (DA-IICT) since 2002. He was educated in Netarhat School(near Ranchi), IIT Kharagpur and Delhi University. He received his Ph D from University of California, Berkeley where he carried our research on “Nuclear Fusion” at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory during 1983-86. He immediately returned to India after this and carried out research in Nuclear Fusion area at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Calcutta and Institute for Plasma Research(IPR), Gandhinagar. He played a major role in India’s Nuclear Fusion program and was Project Leader of the largest operational Indian Fusion Reactor, ADITYA, at Institute for Plasma Research from 1996-2002. His current interests include applications of Wireless Sensor Network to Wildlife, Planetary Exploration (Chandrayaan mission), Nuclear Fusion, Healthcare, Agriculture etc. He has received National Science Talent Search Award, IBM Faculty Innovation Grant and HP Innovate 2009 award, NPEDP-Mphasis Universal Design Award 2012, Bihar Gaurav Samman 2012 etc. View all posts by Prabhat Ranjan