I subscribed to Verizon Mobile Broadband recently, after having paid for Wi-Fi one too many times at coffee shops. Googling for my card model (Kyocera KPC680) before I ordered it seemed to turn up a few hits, but the instructions I’d found were all about setting up PPP manually in config files in /etc and the like. Seeing as this is 2008 and not 1998, I started checking out NetworkManager‘s support.

NetworkManager connected to Verizon EV-DO

It turned out my card was new enough that the kernel driver PCI lists didn’t include it – but adding it to the driver PCI ID list, and writing a .fdi file so it was flagged as a CDMA modem got me going. Both of these changes should be showing up in Linux kernel and HAL releases hopefully. So far it’s been very reliable, and all I have to do is click on the NetworkManager applet and pick “Auto CDMA Dialup connection”. Pretty cool, nice work NM team!