K610i As A Modem Under Linux

05 Jun 2008

Last night I found myself a long way from an Internet connection and needing to check my email. I thought I’d finally try using my mobile phone (a 2 year old Sony Ericsson k610i) as a modem as 3G had recently been enabled in the area. My laptop is running Debian unstable with a 2.6.25 kernel.

I plugged the phone in with its USB cable, and noticed 2 serial ports come up. A tutorial page I’d saved during an earlier research session gave me some tips on using one of the serial ports to establish a PPP connection. It nearly worked as advertised

• the phone connected to the Internet, my PPP sessions got an IP address, and I could make DNS lookups. Unfortunately I couldn’t seem to get any other type of traffic to work. My TCP SYN packets went unanswered.

After 30 minutes or so of debugging, I tried a new option in the phone menu:

Settings -> Connectivity -> USB -> USB Internet -> Turn On

As soon as I enabled that, my laptop discovered a new USB ethernet device. Seconds after that, I had a global IP address and was happily browsing the net - no PPP connection required.

Now if only the data rates from my phone company weren’t so excessive….