Cingular or Verizon wirless service with Linux

I am trying to figure out whether it will work to use Cingular's or
Verizon's or T-Mobile's wireless internet service on a Linux system.
The service typically uses a PCMCIA wireless networking card, such as
the Sony Ericson GC83 card, to connect to the provider's network.

I've done some google searching for drivers for the above card (used by
Cingular) and two cards used for the Verizon service - the Novatel V620 and
the Sierra Wireless AC580. I've not found much evidence of any of these
cards working on Linux, except for this post about the V620:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/300962

It's obvious that none of the card vendors officially supports Linux, but
the above site gives evidence that at least the V620 can be used on a Linux
machine.

I am not at all a hardware expert and am confused about what is needed.
Is a specific Linux driver needed for a specific card, or will all cards
follow a standard protocol and a driver for that protocol is needed?

This site talks about a Novatel G100 card and appears to imply that all
that is needed to drive the card is PCMCIA support:

"If you have kernel support for PCMCIA serial devices (CONFIG_SERIAL and
CONFIG_PCMCIA_SERIAL_CS), you'll be able to plug this card in and have it
appear as a serial port on your system (dmesg reported ttyS02 at port
0x03e8, and ttyS02 corresponds to /dev/ttyS2). From there, it's a simple
matter of configuring a PPP connection. I used the following peers file
(/etc/ppp/peers/tmobile). You'll need to change the device name to match
what it is assigned on your own machine: ..."

It also looks like some cards might be USB devices instead of PCMCIA.

So as you can see, I'm confused as to what is involved in getting one of
these cards to work on Linux. Any help or pointers on this will be
appreciated.


Thanks!

--
Jim Cochrane; (E-Mail Removed)
[When responding by email, include the term non-spam in the subject line to
get through my spam filter.]


Jim Cochrane

Jim Cochrane wrote:
> I am trying to figure out whether it will work to use Cingular's or
> Verizon's or T-Mobile's wireless internet service on a Linux system.
> The service typically uses a PCMCIA wireless networking card, such as
> the Sony Ericson GC83 card, to connect to the provider's network.
....
> I am not at all a hardware expert and am confused about what is needed.
> Is a specific Linux driver needed for a specific card, or will all cards
> follow a standard protocol and a driver for that protocol is needed?

I'm using an Audiovox PC5740 PCMCIA card in my FC4 laptop with Verizon
EV-DO service. It seems to work pretty well, although I'm not 100%
certain that I'm seeing proper EV-DO speeds. I configured my system
according to the instructions available on the web for using the PC5740
with Linux.

The way this card works internally is by providing a PCMCIA->USB bridge,
and a standard USB serial interface that can be used to communicate with
the modem. My Linux kernel has all the drivers necessary for accessing
this serial interface.

As far as I know, noone has implemented code to query the modem for
statistics such as signal quality. However, I do have much better luck
with this modem in Linux than I do in Windows. (The provided "VZAccess"
software is crap, and it frequently gets into a senile state where it
thinks the modem is "busy" and will not access it.) I do believe you
need to "register" the card (with the Verizon network) in Windows with
the VZAccess software before you can use it in Linux.

David