My mobile contract recently expired and instead of upgrading with a new mobile phone I chose the Huawei E170 T-Mobile Web 'n' Walk Stick. They seemed a bit confused at this request at first and had to 'speak to their superiors' but eventually agreed that there was no reason that I shouldn't be sent the USB Stick. This means I can add on the Web 'n' Walk Plus or Max packages as and when I need them at the discounted rates when using them as add ons.
To get the USB Stick to work with Mac OS X Leopard though you'll will need to do a few things for yourself as the Web 'n' Walk stick manager software crashed repeatedly when I tried to use it to connect. Here are the steps:
- Plug the Web 'n' Walk stick into your mac.
- Open System Preferences and then 'Network'
- You should see a message about new connection devices (I think two are added for some reason: 'DIAG' and 'HUAWEI Mobile')
- Select the 'HUAWEI Mobile' device in the left column
- Enter *99# into 'Telephone Number'
- Click 'Apply' and then 'Connect'
You should now be connected using your modem. Simple really! I actually noticed once connected you can open the Web 'n' Walk stick manager software to monitor the connection. Considering it's this simple I think its a bit misleading that T-Mobile say the device isn't supported on Leopard. Feel free to share your experiences below in case there are other issues.
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thanks for the info. Just got my stick today... I'm using OS X 10.4 and the supplied software kept crashing for me as soon as I loaded it too. After entering the phone number in network prefs, the web 'n' walk manager no longer crashes at startup, but still crashes when I try to connect. It seems however that just using Apple's built in internet connect is all that is needed to fix the problem! The web 'n' walk manager will show the connection statistics fine though. We are still missing out on the SMS capabilities and other bandwidth monitoring tools that come with the windows version. I wonder if there is a 3rd party replacement? The guy in the shop told me that there was some free texts (50 per month?) included in the contract, so it seems Mac users are being deprived here!
Written on Friday, April 4, 2008 at 17:01hrs by Tom
Interesting - yeah thats pretty much what I discovered. Something odd has happened with my installation though now - I think I might have somehow managed to uninstall the stick manager so that I can't even try and open it. I just says it has been uninstalled and needs to be re-installed. I did this and then opened it - and this time it seemed to work, even connecting. Yeah would be good if someone came up with a 3rd party replacement. There is a version on the t-mobile website which was newer than the version on the cd-rom, this might have had something to do with it. You can get it from www.t-mobile.co.uk/datacardhelp - hopefully they will post an updated version there in due course.
Written on Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 0:36hrs by the author
Just noticed you said you were using 10.4 - thats odd that it shows the same problems as in leopard - sounds like typical dodgy software we get fobbed off with with these types of things!
Written on Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 0:38hrs by the author
Yeah it seems like T-mobile contracted it out on the cheap, there are even two different versions of the manual, the one on the mobile and the one on the stick... clearly poorly translated from Chinese. Oh one other thing I remember I also had to do to get it to work, which was to change the modem script in the network prefs to the correct Huawei one and not the default Apple one that was selected. And I had to look up on another website what the default PIN code was for the SIM, because they didn't even tell me that. Oh well at least it does seem to give a reasonable speed once it's finally possible to connect...
Written on Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 16:20hrs by Tom
How many bars of signal are you getting? I have had some impressive results in terms of speed at my home in Exeter - it gets full signal and says its operating on HSDPA (which it should be) and gets a few kb's under the 2mbs download (testing from speedtest.net) and around 380kbs upload speed. Both of which are faster than my ADSL broadband line! However, I've noticed the download speed seems to drop to about 300kbs if the signal is as low as 1 bar (still HSDPA), but with two bars it goes up to 422kpbs. Seems like it likes to have a good strong signal to get the best speeds.
Written on Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 21:14hrs by the author
Hi, you might want to have a look at launch2net (www.launch2net.com). it is not free, but might be a better allround solution if you need to use other SIM cards in different countries or need a better statistic. It works with most networks and modems worldwide. Cheers Jan (nova media)
Written on Monday, April 7, 2008 at 4:30hrs by Jan Fuellemann
Thanks Jan - I tried the demo and all seems to work very well. It's a bit expensive for me though. Guess it would be nice to see SMS support in there too.
Written on Monday, April 7, 2008 at 6:18hrs by the author
Hi Jan, Thanks for the tip - was getting very frustrated trying to get my new Web n Walk to start up earlier. I've now saved the settings as a location on my mac and if you switch to this when you want to use the stick you can use the Stick Manager without it crashing.
Written on Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 8:18hrs by damien
I'm north of Glasgow just now, getting two bars, and about 300-400kbps up and down - not too bad. A bit of latency sometimes it seems, but results are fairly typical. I'll mainly be using it in Edinburgh where the signal strength seems better though!
Written on Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 6:39hrs by Tom
Hi, i just had to say thanks for posting this info, i just bought the same usb stick encountered all the same 'quitting' issues, rang support helpline - told it was compatible, downloaded driver update still no joy. Found your info applied settings as instructed - perfetto e tutto bene! Grazie mille tutto
Written on Saturday, April 12, 2008 at 3:29hrs by Azzurri
Very useful information. Thanks!P.S Your blog won't accept my .co.uk email address
Written on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 8:32hrs by Ben
Sorry about the email verification - I've replaced the script - its failed a few now but the new one shouldn't cause any problems.
Written on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 8:38hrs by the author
I have tried the web n walk stick on my Macbook Pro. There dosent seem to be enough power in the USB ports to power the modem and as soon as it connects it drops the device and then says it can't find the device. Sometimes it comes back up and you can reconnect and other times you have to remove and reconnect the device. T-mobile were very helpful but they say the USB modem version carries a usb splitter to combine the power of two ports but the USB stick dosent. This would not be a benifit to MBP anyway because it only has one USb on each side of the laptop. Ended up sending it back.
Written on Saturday, July 5, 2008 at 1:10hrs by Paul Dresser