Please help Huawei E160 3G only

[UbuntuMan]

Hello Finland!

I have a Huawei E160 "tikku". I want to set my stick to 3G ONLY because lately my stick has been going from 3G to GPRS which means my connection get's disconnected all the time.

Can anybody tell me how to set my stick to 3G only? I use Ubuntu 10.04LTS.

I can read Finnish but I don't think you would be able to understand my written Finnish.

I also hope I did not offend anybody by coming to Finnish only chat room.

Thank you and Kiitos

[Ganymedes]

Hello Finland!

I have a Huawei E160 "tikku". I want to set my stick to 3G ONLY because lately my stick has been going from 3G to GPRS which means my connection get's disconnected all the time.

Can anybody tell me how to set my stick to 3G only? I use Ubuntu 10.04LTS.

I can read Finnish but I don't think you would be able to understand my written Finnish.

I also hope I did not offend anybody by coming to Finnish only chat room.

Thank you and Kiitos

Welcome to Forum and I do not think that using English is any kind of problem here.

First, I am not sure that changing mode is the primary reason for interrupts. I have lately used some USB 3G modem on the Hämeenlinna highway with 10.04 (if I remember correctly), where the connection must have been changing constantly between GPRS - Edge - 3G, and there where no interrupts, other than waiting periods when the connection a couple of times disappeared completely.

Could the problems be caused by USB power supply problems? You can ease up the situation, by: removing all the cables between the computer and the stick, and removing any SD-card that might be inserted in the stick (I do not remember if that particular stick can have an extra card or not). Also changing the USB slot might make the difference (they are different on different sides of computer/laptop and devices needing a lot of power might be best not inserted next to each other).

As for forcing 3G, I am sure others can help you with that. I have not studied that since there has been no need. I use that particular stick E160 with Elisa connection on my mini-laptop with Ubuntu 9.04 NBR - so different case, no problems anyway, but that notation does not really help you, I think.

[Aliengrey]

I have had many Huawei 3G modems and i had that same problem with every of them. I live in Helsinki where 3G should work great. With windows it was the same so its not about operating system. Sorry that i couldt help so much but welcome to the forum.

[UbuntuMan]

Ganymedes,

Thank you very much for your reply. You actually brought up many interesting points. I got my "Tikku" as a Saunalahti prepaid stick. Problem is I must pay 6,90€ every 7 days so my connection is expensive. Thus, I want to try different operators here in Finland  that I can use. And ones that are cheaper too.

When I got my stick I was assured it was unlocked. This is important when roaming outside Finland or trying another Finnish operator. Anyway, I found that my stick was not unlocked. But there are number of unlock generators and inserters on the Internet for E160. I was able to unlock my stick in just 10 minutes!

I then tried a TeleFinland sim. This connection jumps from green to blue and each time this happens I need to reload my "tikku". This is why I want to lock onto 3G only. This will prevent that problem from happening.

Ganymedes, what are your thoughts on using a dual headed USB cable to deliver more power to the stick? In some cases this can help deliver better signal quality. In any case, I have on order an external antenna to see if this helps.

Thanks!

[UbuntuMan]

Hello Aliengray,

In the English Ubuntu Forum there is some talk of the same issue too. one topic heading is called:

"How to lock mobile broadband on 3G network only ?"

And it is suggested to use WVdialer as a work around with the following commands

AT^SYSCFG=13,1,3FFFFFFF,2,4 # GPRS only
AT^SYSCFG=2,1,3FFFFFFF,2,4 # GPRS prefered
AT^SYSCFG=14,2,3FFFFFFF,2,4 # 3G ONLY
AT^SYSCFG=2,2,3FFFFFFF,2,4 # 3G prefered

WVdialer wasn't working for me so I wanted to try something better. But maybe these commands do work for our stick?

[Aliengrey]

Thanks UbuntuMan. Ill give it a try

[Ganymedes]

Actually, the example that I gave about "highway use" was not accurate, I finally found it on this Forum and the case was: JoliCloud Prefinal (an Ubuntu derivate distro, maybe closer to 9.10) with Huawei E620. So at least one Huawei worked very well with changing modes.

Your solutions for power supply and better receiving - well, I think they are good, well worth trying out. Actually, not being any kind of expert on these issues but by looking at the diversity of questions around these issues on this Forum, I think that the problems are likely to be a combination of both of these things: power supply and receiving situation combined with regular setup issues. Otherwise, I cannot explain why these USB Modems give so varying results in different systems.

I hope this helps at least somewhat.

[UbuntuMan]

Aliengrey,

If you get your E160 working can you kindly let me know what you did to set to 3G only.

Thanks!

[Wolfman]

One thing from past (couple years ago), not sure if it's valid today. I have Elisa and it changes 3G <-> EDGE without broblem but friend of mine had Saunalahti and he had that broblem, changing 3G <-> EDGE disconnect net every time (and many times cut phone calls too). Saunalahti uses some kind "subnet" in Elisa's network and that might cause some broblems. I think that those broblems have been mostly fixed today but still... And current Saunalahti prepaid uses different APN than "normal" Saunalahti, prepaid uses same APN than Elisa so maybe prepaid uses Elisa's network "directly" and not Saunalahti's subnet ?

Maybe Telefinland have similar situation on Sonera's network ?

Those AT commands in previous message works atleast with Huawei's E160E and E1552, used those sometimes when 3G is available but EDGE is much stronger and stick switch to EDGE too easily. I think that those commands are "standard" AT commands.

[tetrao]

Hi UbuntuMan,

I dont have any experience with huawei E160, but this link might interest you:
http://forum.ubuntu-fi.org/index.php?topic=30262.msg277628#msg277628

I didn't translate this because you can read finnish, right?

Hope that solves your issue and welcome to Forum!  

[UbuntuMan]

Wolfman,

When I unlocked my Huawei E160, see you tube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbhrZKwHHa8

And then installed this program:

http://rapidshare.com/files/393444529/huawei_all_models_unlocker.rar

It said my stick was E160X. And my stick was bought in Finland. So will these AT commands still work? If so how are you installing/running them?

Also do they need to be run each time Ubuntu is re-booted or is the change performed inside the stick?

Can we confirm that 3G is higher performance than EDGE.....

[Ganymedes]

According to Wikipedia:

GPRS                       - 30-40 kbit/s, practically

Edge, EGPRS, 2.5G - 160–200 kbit/s in average, 296 kbit/s at best

3G                           - 384 kbit/s, according to standard

HSPA                       - typically 1, 2, 3.6 kbit/s or whatever depending on the stick and your contract


Commercially, I think, "3G" in an ad means this maximum of 384 kbit/s. If they offer more, they will make a bit deal about it in ads and in contracts (like Sonera does).

[UbuntuMan]

tetrao offered in his post a great link..... So how do you determine if the USB stick is USB1 or USB0 or something else???

I ran lsusb in terminal but it did not show anything......

P.s. if somebody uses the unlocking info above you may need to have a non-network sim installed first so the program realises that the device in sim locked.

[Wolfman]

It said my stick was E160X. And my stick was bought in Finland. So will these AT commands still work? If so how are you installing/running them?

Also do they need to be run each time Ubuntu is re-booted or is the change performed inside the stick?

Can we confirm that 3G is higher performance than EDGE.....

Those AT commands _shoud_ work every model, and even sticks from other manufacturers. Usage depends how you connect, i think network manager is missing "additional init strings" ? If you use scripts to connect and disconnect you can send those from same script that sends ATD#99* to open connection. Those changes are not stored so they have to resend everytime, usualy as "additional init" from dialer right before dialing.

I think "bare 3G" is very rare atleast in finland (Elisa's network), mostly 3G means HSPA. Haven't seen 3G network with only 384kb/s, usualy around 500-800kb/s with 1Mb contract when phone shows 3G.

[tetrao]

So how do you determine if the USB stick is USB1 or USB0 or something else???

Try this one out:

Koodia: [Valitse]

ls /dev/ttyUSB*


[UbuntuMan]

ls /dev/ttyUSB*      gives back      USB0 AND USB1

[Ganymedes]

...
I think "bare 3G" is very rare atleast in finland (Elisa's network), mostly 3G means HSPA. Haven't seen 3G network with only 384kb/s, usualy around 500-800kb/s with 1Mb contract when phone shows 3G.

With Sonera perhaps. All the fancy adds by DNA are 384 kbit/s. My current Elisa phone connection is like that, too. So not really rare at all. However, DNA is only 2,95 eur per month ... depends on what you want and can benefit of.

[UbuntuMan]

I gave DNA a shot but it worked real bad so I gave it back.

[Ganymedes]

I gave DNA a shot but it worked real bad so I gave it back.

Hehe, I am not using it. I have it only for the means of purchasing a phone cheaply  .

You can even downgrade the contract to 0.91 eur/month deal after you have bought the phone. The phone was more than 200 euros cheaper that way than just buying it from a normally cheap Netstore (Verkkokauppa.com).

Sometimes these deals are rather odd ... but I am not complaining 

[UbuntuMan]

Attached PDF is in Finnish and has been quite helpful.

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