Getting your Huawei modem working with Mac OS X Mountain Lion and Lion

You know the part before the upgrade where they tell you to check all of your applications before you upgrade? Well, last night I decided that it would be a great idea to upgrade my Mac from Snow Leopard to Lion. Turns out that perhaps wasn’t so great an idea after all when my Huawei USB 3G modem dongle decided that it wasn’t going to work since it wasn’t relevant for the new 64-bit only kernel. Oops, I should have checked first. But it isn’t a complete disaster!

Update: This appears to also work with Mountain Lion as well according to some comments at the bottom. It may not work for everyone but it does appear to work for some.

After frantically using Google to find a new driver to install and digging around the Huawei site trying to find a replacement driver I was getting to the point of doing some modifications to the com.apple.boot.plist file and restart my Mac with the i386 kernel instead of the x86-64 one that appears to now be the default.

In my many searches for a Mac OS X Lion compatible driver, I managed to find the following from mobile provider “3″ in UK. The link, http://ask3.three.co.uk/mbbdocs/drivers/apple_drivers.html, contains a link to “dongle drivers” for “Huawei dongles” that work for Mac OS X Lion (10.7). Sounds like a winner!

So I download the zip file and it extracts out to leave me with a “3Connect Installer”. Not quite what I want however all is not lost. You see applications on Mac OS X are actually folders in disguise commonly referred to as either “bundles” or “packages”. So right click on the “3Connect Installer” and select “Show Package Contents”. This opens up a view with only “Contents” listed, foiled? Don’t worry, double click into that directory and then into the “Resources” directory. Here we find a “mobilemanager.mpkg” file. Now “mpkg” is a package which means it has more goodies in it.

So we right click on this and select “Show Package Contents” again. We’ve got our “Contents” folder and inside that we want to go to the “Packages” folder. In there two packages exist: “mobile_manager_application.pkg” and “huawei_universal_425_05.pkg”. Now if you’re like me, everything is setup already – you just need the driver. So I skipped the mobile manager application and just double clicked on the “huawei_universal_425_05.pkg” file and installed it.

After installing the Huawei Universal package, the next time I plugged in my Huawei E160 into my Mac it was detected and worked perfectly fine.

So if you’ve just upgraded to Lion (now Mountain Lion too) and are trying to work out how to get your Huawei modem working properly with it, these instructions worked for me and I’m using it to write this post.

Update: It looks like *99# works rather universally as a telephone number for getting the modem to work. On Mountain Lion this is what the Network Preferences screen looks like: