Using a Vodacom 3G Card on Mac OS X

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:12:16 +0000

I’m in South Africa at the moment and my CDMA phone is useless here. I got a Huawei wireless USB modem from Vodacom to use, but for the first few days I had it I could only get it to work on my virtualized Windows machine. I finally managed to get it working by allowing OS X to do the configuration and dialing rather than the Vodafone Mobile Connect software.

Here’s how I managed it:

Open the Network panel in System Preferences
Click the + symbol in the lower left to add a new interface and select the modem.
Go to Advanced options.
Select “Generic” for the Vendor and “GPRS (GSM/3g)” for the model. Enter “Internet” for the APN. This seems to matter, as I tried a few other strings and could not authenticate.
Enter *99***1# for the telephone number and save the configuration.

To connect, you must first have the Vodafone Mobile Connect application installed, as there is no way that I found to enter the PIN via OS X. Plug in your modem, open Mobile Connect, and enter your pin. Then go back your network preferences, select the interface you’ve just configured, and click connect. If all goes well you should now be connected. I am not sure if this will work in locales other than South Africa; the phone number to connect may well be different.

Brandon M. Westsouth africa » Brandon M. West

Using a Vodacom 3G Card on Mac OS X