Mobile broadband for linux

It appears that new mobile internet dongles aren’t very well supported in linux.

I had problems get the new vodafone dongle to work (ZTE K3570-Z – I bought this in January 2010, this was with quite a lot of work).

3 were the only provider who I could be sure provided a dongle that worked with linux (ZTE MF112 avaiable as of april 2011).

This worked out of the box with Lucid, with the following caveats:

i. The dongle occasionally sent out stronger signals causing my monitor to flicker. (This was very occasional every hour or so, and on a laptop)

ii. The dongle becomes quite hot (more noticeable so that with the windows only vodafone dongle).

iii. I think the connector on the dongle is slightly flimsy. I managed to break this by leaving my laptop on things. Though I was by no means being careful. I would advise using the connector provided.