No, this isn’t about porn, but when it’s done it’ll be even more awesome.
Tambet Ingo has been kicking mobile broadband ass recently, using it to club the NetworkManager PPP integration into shape. And that rocks. He’s been a driving force of NetworkManager for the last year, spearheading the D-Bus interface rewrite and the major refactoring for the upcoming 0.7 release. Buy him a whole keg next time you sit down at a bar and find out he’s just two seats down from you, looking all badass.
Now with 100% more NetworkManager
Interaction with 3G cards is going to work a lot like VPN connections currently do. The 3G card will show up in the applet’s menu. It will have a sub-menu of connections that you’ve created for the card. If you use more than one provider, you can create a connection for each provider and switch between the two. Eventually, you’ll be able to share that 3G connection over wifi or ethernet too. Obligatory mockup follows:
Deliciously easy 3G…
Right now the preliminary support is for GSM-based cards, most things that have the words GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA, HSUPA, or HSPA on them. We’ll soon add support for CDMA-based 1xRTT, EVDO rev 0, and EVDO rev A cards too. It’s pretty rough at the moment, and he just committed it this morning, so don’t expect the thing to work just because you plugged it in (yet). After the PPP bits have been worked over Jack Bristo-style and are begging for mercy, we’ll start adding support for serial modem, ISDN, and Bluetooth DUN.
You ask, we provide.
Are you planning on binding the PPP settings to the modem or the SIM card? (assuming it is possible to identify the SIM in the modem).
For the case you’ve included in the screenshot, if the user uses different SIM cards in each country (to avoid roaming charges), then it should be pretty obvious which settings to use …
James: good point; I think there are ways through AT commands to get the SIM ID (whatever that is), so we may be able to let the user specify that ID in the connection settings.