Mobile Warrior: using your cellphone to connect your laptop to the Internet

One of the integral parts of my "Perfect Phone" series is using your mobile phone and data plan for Internet access, saving about $45 per month in DSL or cable charges. That overview of consolidating all communications costs gave a general overview and relied on JoikuSpot or Walking Hotspot to create a local wi-fi connection through which your laptop could connect to the Internet.

This post, however, will address a very specific connection: using your Nokia Nseries phone as a modem to connect a computer running Ubuntu (or any Debian-derivative) Linux to the Internet. If you are running Windows, take a look at the Nokia PCSuite. You do not need to have wi-fi on your phone, however, as we are going to connect it directly to the computer with the USB cable.

1. Make sure wvdial is installed. It was already on my 8.04 (upgraded from 7.10) laptop so I did not have to do anything. To check, run locate bin/wvdial to see if Ubuntu finds the program. If so, skip to step 3.
2. Run sudo apt-get install wvdial
3. Connect your phone to the computer using the USB cable that came with the phone.
4. Choose "PC Suite" when the phone asks for the type of connection.
5. Run sudo wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf
   
6. You should see a line like

   ttyUSB0<*1>: Modem Identifier: ATI -- Nokia

   when running this command. This means wvdial found your phone and recognizes it as a usable modem.
7. Edit the config file sudo emacs /etc/wvdial.conf replacing 'emacs' with your favourite editor. You should see that wvdial has configured some things but left others we need alone.
   
8. Keeping the Init1, Init2, etc strings in there, add a new one with Init# where # is one more than the last one. Add

   Init# = AT+CGDCONT=1, "IP", "WAP.CINGULAR"
   ISDN = 0
   Stupid Mode = 1
   New PPPD = yes
   Phone = *99#
   Password = test
   Username = test

   to your file. The password and username can be anything, AT&T does not require them, however, they need to be something and test was creative enough for me. (I have provided my full wvdial.conf at the bottom for reference. If you are using a Nokia Nseries (probably, any Symbian s60 phone) you ought to be able to just drop this config in your setup and go. The one line you might have to change is the Modem one, and you can simply point that whatever wvdialconf found or set it to /dev/modem.)
   
9. Save the file and exit.
10. Run sudo wvdial on the command line and you should connect to the Internet.
    

Make sure you have an unlimited data plan to use this. With 3G you can chew through data pretty quickly.

References:

• Tuxomatic: Airtel GPRS on Linux
• Ubuntu Forums: AT&T tethering problem
• Ubuntu Forums: Using a GSM cellphone as a modem
• My wvdial.conf:
  

  [Dialer Defaults]
  Init1 = ATZ
  Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
  Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1, "IP", "WAP.CINGULAR"
  Modem Type = USB Modem
  Baud = 460800
  New PPPD = yes
  Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
  ISDN = 0
  Stupid Mode = 1
  New PPPD = yes
  Phone = *99#
  Password = test
  Username = test