A New Phase

I purchased Indosat IM2 which is an unlimited mobile broadband connection a few days ago. It was a 50-50 choice between this and Telkom Speedy. In the end I chose it as the marketing people at Telkom didn’t call me. Congratulation you guys lost a potential customer

Anyway, the Indosat technical support at Sarinah wasn’t able to configure the connection on Ubuntu. I managed to configure the connection the next day after searching around the web and forum. Thus, I’d like to create a simple guide that I hope will be beneficial to others.

The easiest way is to use wvdial which is an utility that helps to make a modem-based Internet connection. I used my mobile phone as the modem as I thought it doesn’t make sense to spend more than 1 million rupiah on a modem when we can acquire a 3G mobile phone for about the same price.

Wvdial depends on a configuration file, wvdial.conf, which is located on the /etc directory. The file is empty initially and thus, the first thing we have to do is fill it in. The easiest way to configure it is to run

sudo wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf

from the terminal with the modem connected to the computer. This will detect the modem and fill-in the configuration file with various default settings. Then we need to fill-in the specific details regarding the connection we’re using such as the phone no, the user name and the password.

Here is my configuration file

[Dialer Defaults]
Auto DNS = true
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”indosatm2″
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Password = your password
Username = your username

I added the followings to the default configuration file:

• Auto DNS – automatically obtain DNS.
• Init3 – contains the APN of Indosat IM2 which is indosatm2.
• Phone – the no to dial.
• Password and username – the password and username we obtained when we activated our im2 card.

That’s it then. When we want to connect to the Internet, open up a terminal and type sudo wvdial. Use control-c to terminate it.

Hope it helps.