Getting the network interface working on ZTE K3570 etc

[Andrew Bird (Sphere Systems)]

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?


Andrew