arundhaj

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Connecting internet with USB modem - Raspberry Pi

 

After some exploration, I could successfully connet to the internet with Tata Photon Plus from my Pi. Though with Raspbian, it is not as straight forward as it is with any other Linux varient.

There are many options available for connecting to the internet, based on the available infrastructure. In my case, I have a Tata Photon Plus (Olive VME102) USB modem which I use it on my laptop directly. With establishing peer-to-peer connetion, I first tried to share the internet from my Windows 7 laptop to the Pi. I still didn't found a way out and working on it. Later, decided to first bring my Pi on the internet then started to do this. Some of the steps requires external modules that has to be downloaded. So, during these setup process, the Pi has to be in the internet. I connected my Pi in my office intranet for initial configuration.

Your /etc/network/interfaces file should contain the configuration for connecting to the office intranet.

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

When the USB modem is connected for the first time it would be detected as a storage device and would be using usb-storage driver. My device was assigned to /dev/sr0 file, which is a storage file. Check it with

$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/usb*

Load the device's specific module with modprobe usbserial vendor=0x22F4 product=0x0021. Then check which driver has been loaded for the device with usb-devices command. Mostly it would be showing as usb-storage. Now usb_modeswitch has to be installed to change it to a serial device. Once installed, it will automatically change. Seems there are few unsupported devices, in which case, it has to be done manually. Upon success, the device would be reassiged to /dev/ttyUSB0. Confirm it with dmesg.

Further, install wvdial and your /etc/wvdial.conf file should look like this.

Init = ATZ
Init = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 115200
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Phone = #777
Username = internet 
Password = internet
Stupid Mode = 1

Then start dialing and enjoy browsing!!!

$ sudo wvdial

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