Having just moved house I find myself in a position of having no reliable internet connection. Not my favourite place to be.

Last time I moved I had a prepay Optus 3G USB kit, the experience was unbelievably frustrating. I won’t elaborate here, but a #badoptus Twitter search will tell you in real time what people think about it.

Anyway, when the dust settled here today I pulled that modem out and it wouldn’t even think about connecting. Perhaps the SIM gets deactivated if you don’t connect for six months, I’m not sure. I certainly didn’t feel like spending any more money with them to find out.

I did notice the other day that Three are now doing a prepaid 3G offering with a BYO modem package as well. Looked like a good option so I picked one of those up. I have one of the ExpressCard modems from a few years ago so it should have been easy.

Should! Turns out my driver CD was damaged. 

I managed to get the Three SIM working with the Optus modem and connection client though. It worked OK but the USB modem is so easy to bump and I’m not sure it wasn’t half the problem while on Optus, so next step was to download drivers for the Express Card.

Note to Three here… your website sucks, and your search sucks. Your MobiLink download page is here, maybe someone could tell your search “engine”.

Downloaded those, do you think they would install for me on Windows 7 ? Of couse not. That’s alright, I didn’t want the silly connection manager anyway.

Next step, go to the source. The Three modem was actually a Novatel XU870, and the drivers can be downloaded by themselves here.

If you do this, you can actually set up your wireless connection like a dial up connection, and do away with any extra connection client.

It’s worth grabbing the documentation PDF from the Novatel page as it walks you through this process and you’ll need to configure the initialization string for the modem to make it connect. Once you can figure out the APN that is!

The APN is an access point name that informs the modem where to connect, much like a Wifi SSID. If you get this wrong, you’ll be trying to talk to the wrong access point and won’t get anywhere. Or something like that.

As usual, Google and Whirlpool to the rescue for things like this. It turns out that Three use a different APN for their prepay (“3services”) and their normal network (“3netaccess”). So the final init string for this is

AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3services"

So with the instructions followed, and the correct APN. I now can connect to the Three network, and I have internets once again while I wait for the ADSL to get connected.

Hopefully this combination of technolgies will seed the Google and help someone else in need.

UPDATE : Sept 09

It seems that on the RC (and I’m assuming RTM) of Windows 7, this configuration step is no longer needed. Just install the drivers, create a connection and away you go!