Huawei E156G USB Stick on Ubuntu 8.04

February 13, 2009 (Last Modified: March 14, 2020)

Today I got myself mobile internet for my notebook, as I am going move to Vienna and do not want to spend a single day without having a working Internet connection available. The cheapest offer I could find for my purpose was the 3Data Lässig rate (15 GB for 16€ per month). As I am extremely impatient, when it comes down to buying electronics, I headed for the telecommunications store in my home town and registered for the mentioned 3Data rate, which came with a Huawei E156G stick. The problem was that I did not know in advance, that I would have no choice for any other data modem, as the only sell this version in my region. But I wanted to have it now, as I am going to travel on Monday. So I gambled and just guessed that the stick is supported by Ubuntu 8.04. The E156G is recognized as

ID 12d1:1003 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E220 HSDPA Modem

I was lucky and it worked more or less out of the box (to be honest, it took me two hours until I stopped messing with network-manager 0.7 and switched to UMTSmon 🙂 ). Just plug it in, get UMTSmon 0.9 from sourceforge, extract it and run the contained executable. Thats it!