HOWTO_cell_phone_modem

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This HOWTO describes how to use your cell phone as a modem over USB.

Prerequisites

You need:

• Compatible cell phone
• Cell phone to USB cable

The author has a Motorola RAZR V3 and the ubiquitous mini-B USB cable.

Kernel setup

You need the usbserial 'module. If your dialup uses PPP, enable that as well.

usbserial

Now we need an entry in /dev to represent the modem. Fortunately usbserial can turn a USB device into a character device. All we need to do is to load usbserial with parameters specifying which USB device to use.

1. lsusb

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 22b8:4902 Motorola PCS E398 GSM Phone Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

The hexadecimal numbers following 'ID' are what we're interested in. The first four digits are the vendor, the other four is the product id.

1. modprobe usbserial vendor=0x22b8 product=0x4902

Check dmesg. Hopefully you'll see a line like:

usb 3-3: generic converter now attached to ttyUSB0

You now have a working modem device. I'll go through kppp setup (because that's all I've tried/needed).

1. kppp

Click "Configure...". Select the "Modems" tab. Click "New...". Type in something for name. Device should be /dev/ttyUSB0. Select the "Modem" tab. Run "Query Modem...". If it's working, it will bring up a set of text boxes. ATI3 will be the name of your phone.