Getting the network interface working on ZTE K3570 etc

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, 2012-04-16 at 17:07 +0100, Andrew Bird (Sphere Systems) wrote:
> On Monday 16 April 2012, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Sun, 2012-03-25 at 18:13 +0100, Andrew Bird (Sphere Systems) wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > 	I'm new to this list but I recently sent some patches to the kernel devs
> > > 
> > > following on from the qmi-wwan work that was recently done. I'm looking
> > > to get to the point where ZTE based mobile broadband sticks(and others)
> > > can be connected using the network interface rather than using pppd. Is
> > > that a goal shared by the libqmi people too? Ideally for me the library
> > > would be usable from both Modem Manager and perhaps Wader eventually via
> > > python bindings. I've been looking at the repo at
> > > git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libqmi.git and wondered if that was the
> > > best place to try out the bleeding edge stuff? I've played with the
> > > sample qmitest.c program and managed to get sensible data for signal
> > > strength etc, but no MEID since my devices are all UMTS. I see several
> > > directories in the repo that appear to have reference material, but only
> > > really the qmitest.c that looks like it's home grown. Am I seeing the
> > > very early start of libqmi, or is there somewhere else I should look?
> > 
> > Some of the recent Huawei and ZTE devices don't actually need  QMI for
> > that, they sometimes have custom AT commands that activate the net
> > interface.  If the device also supports QMI, there will be two
> > possibilities:
> > 
> > 1) it has a composite QMI/rmnet USB interface for use with cdc-wdm and
> > qmi_wwan
> > 
> > 2) ZTE added a more-standards-compliant USB ethernet interface that gets
> > activated using AT commands
> > 
> > I've seen examples of both. If you have the Windows drivers somewhere,
> > that would probably have some clues.
> > 
> > Dan
> Hi Dan,
>    I've seen that some of the ZTE devices that use the Icera chipset have 
> commands to activate the ethernet interface ('AT%IPDPACT=1,1'), but the 
> devices I meant to say I was talking about here are the earlier Qualcomm era 
> ones such as Vodafone's K3565-Z, which do seem to be cdc-wdm/qmi_wwan. As far 
> as I know there's no AT command to activate those (please correct me if you 
> know of one). So for the most part to get connected/manage the ethernet 
> interface it would seem that the following commands would be needed to be 
> constructed and pushed to cdc-wdm using libqmi:
> 1/ configure the APN, user, password and auth method
> 2/ connect
> 3/ get connection status
> 4/ get assigned DNS addresses
> 5/ disconnect
> 
> I didn't do much more testing with libqmi since posting this after getting 
> positive results for some status values with K3565-Z, work got in the way, but 
> do hope to get back to it soon. I hope to try it out with the code at 
> http://git.chromium.org/chromiumos/platform/libqmi.git too, but I am a little 
> confused as to which repo is the blessed location that ModemManager will 
> eventually use?

The Google team was quicker than I in starting to code libqmi, but my
hope is still that we'll migrate the code at git.chromium.org over to
freedesktop at some point.

Dan