I recently bought an O2 Mobile Broadband ‘Pay & Go’ dongle. The Huawei E160 variety. Its a neat little dongle, which also has a slot for a MicroSD card.

A colleague of mine wanted to get some kind of mobile broadband solution for his netbook – an Acer Aspire One. Brilliant little machine. I fancy a Samsung NC10 myself, or maybe an Asus 1008HA Seashell.

Anyway, he’s running the standard Acer OS – Linpus. He already had the ‘Mobile Partner’ application installed, which is required if you want to connect using a Huawei modem. We plugged the dongle in, and it was recognised by the software within a few seconds, albeit as a Huawei E220 (technically identical to the E160). It picked up a perfectly reasonable O2 3G signal considering we were indoors. Next came the creation of a ‘profile’ for the connection. We set up a new one, called it ‘O2′, and attempted to enter the settings. This is where we got a bit stuck. O2 dont provide any help for this OS. There is software available for Windows and Mac OS X, but that configures your connection settings for you. We needed the settings for a manual setup. A quick Google or two later, and we had found a variety of suggested settings. We tried all of them, but to no avail. In the end, I remembered that when I set a manual connection up on my Mac laptop, I didnt need usernames or passwords, just the APN. So I went ahead and set the APN to be ‘m-bb.o2.co.uk’, with a phone number of ‘*99#’. I’d read that the username of ‘o2bb’ with a password of ‘password’ may be necessary, but I didnt enter these. I left the authentication method as CHAP. As with the other settings we tried, we just kept being presented with the ‘Connecting..’ message, but it never seemed to complete the connection. The light on the dongle (green for GSM, blue for 3G) went solid, which suggested to me that it was completing the connection, but maybe not authenticating?

A bit more Googling, and someone suggested that the Mobile Partner software recently had a bug introduced, which meant that the ‘Connecting…’ message would remain on the screen, even once it had made a successful connection! The workaround is to just minimise the Mobile Partner software once  the light changes to solid. Then you can just load up your web browser, etc, and it should all just work! It certainly did for us.

7 Responses to “O2 3G Mobile Broadband on Acer Aspire One Netbook”

1. Mobile Phone Man | O2 3G Mobile Broadband on Acer Aspire One Netbook says:

   May 7, 2009 at 11:53 AM

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2. Kelly says:

   June 6, 2009 at 12:05 AM

   Thanks to reading this I finally got my t-mobile dongle (Also a Huawei E160) working on my Aspire One. Bit irritating that bug, but it works so all is good
3. Mike says:

   June 7, 2009 at 5:12 PM

   Hi Rob,

   I’ve got exactly the same setup – Huawei 160 on O2 PAYG withan Acer Aspire One. Although I can get the modem to connect with your advice – thanks! – I can’t get access to anything through it. Did you activate it on Windows machine first?
4. Rob says:

   June 7, 2009 at 5:22 PM

   Hi Mike,

   There’s no activation required as such. It’s ready to use out of the box, but as you’re on PAYG, you’ll need to buy some ‘time’ for your dongle. You can do this by visiting http://mobilebroadbandaccess.o2.co.uk/

   You can do this directly on the Acer once you’ve connected as its a free page on PAYG, or you can do it from another machine. Once you’ve bought your time, a quick visit to that page will tell you how much remaining time/data allowance you have left. Hope this helps
5. Mike says:

   June 7, 2009 at 6:08 PM

   Hi Rob,

   I’d just managed to find that out myself, and was coming here to pass on the information! I thought the dongle would automatically force me to go to the payment page, and didn’t know the address to go there manually. I’m all up and running now, thanks for your help
6. Baz says:

   June 28, 2009 at 1:31 PM

   This has been really great advice. I’ve been struggling for about three weeks now to get this to connect and to be able to log on.

   I’ve not paid for access as yet but the O2 page loads up and get navigate through their T&C’s page, buy time, etc. So looks like all up and running now.

   Once again a million thanks for this.
7. Adam says:

   July 2, 2009 at 9:42 AM

   Thanks for posting this, it’s been really helpful. I’ve now got my E160 working a treat on the Aspire One.