How To Use Tata Photon, BSNL EVDO, Reliance Netconnect, MTS, 3G Dongles On Android Tablets?

lmost all cheap / budget tablets advertise that they work with CDMA modems but in practice, when you plug in a CDMA modem, they do not work. In principle both Linux and Android supports CDMA dongles. If the “usb wwan” driver in your tablet mentions support for the particular brand and model of dongle you have, chances are it is really supported in your tablet

Why CDMA Dongles do not work in Android?

The blame here lies squarely on the tablet manufacturer, since their supplied drivers does not play along nicely with the dongle and the dongle manufacturer since they are stupid enough not to realize that their dongles will be used in other OS’s by the users .

Most 3G dongles have an inbuilt storage drive called the “ZeroCD” which contains the drivers and dialers meant for Windows and ZeroCD is the default mode for the dongle. Unfortunately ZeroCD is a CDROM drive emulation and not a modem so it does not work in Linux or Android.  The solution is to switch the default status of the dongle from ZeroCD to a serial modem and therein lies the problem, there is no easy way to do it in Android.

Fortunately there is a way to make CDMA / EVDO dongles work under Android.

The method is crude, involves some tweaking and after your CDMA modem is configured, you have to dial manually to access Internet.

Requirements

1. The CDMA dongle must be supported by your tablet.

2. Your tablet must be rooted.

3. You should be able to connect to your PC and windows should be able to detect it correctly. The tablet needs to be in OTG / Charging mode.

4. Comfortable with tweaking and typing.

5. Patience.

For the purpose of this tutorial I am assuming you have a Huawei EC156 CDMA dongle from Tata Photon Plus and your tablet supports the modem.

Step 1

Download this file. Register or login to see the link and download the file.

Extract the files from a zip, keep everything default. On your tablet go to Settings->Application Development and enable the “USB Debugging” option. if it is already enabled leave it as it is.

Step 2

Connect your tablet to the computer and open the command prompt, go to the directory that has the “adb”executable in it. For example, if you have extracted the download zip archive in to your “D:” drive the command should be

cd d:\arpandeb-cdma\adb
d:

You should now be in the directory, once there type the following

adb shell
su
mount -o remount,rw /system

This will only work if your tablet is rooted. Now that the /system is mounted in the read write mode, we can go to the next step. Exit the shell by pressing ctrl+c or typing exit.

Step 3

Now  type “install” without the quotes and the batch script will transfer all the required files to your tablet.

Doing it manually

If for some reason your tablet is not detected by your computer and you can not use the adb shell, just download the files directly to your tablet or copy them to a microSD card and insert it into your tablet and copy the files to their respective directories using a terminal emulator or the Root Explorer app. Using Root Explorer or ES File Explorer you can remount your files system in “rw” mode too. The location for each file is in the “install.bat” file.  Than you will need to download a terminal emulator app and chmod the required files and give them the permissions that they require to function again, they are mentioned in the install.bat file.

Step 4

Disconnect your tablet from the computer and download a terminal emulator app from the market and run it, in the terminal that opens on your tablet, type

su
cdma.sh

The tablet now will use the dongle to dial to the network and you should be connected to the Internet.

The “gprs” file has the settings for the dialer, right now it is set for Tata Photon. You can change it for your network. The status bar will not show an icon but your internet connection will be active, open the browser to check. Now every time you want to connect to the internet, open the terminal type the above two commands and you are done.

If some one can write an app that does the dialing automatically it will be good.

Troubleshooting

1. If after dialing you can not access the internet, type this

ifconfig ppp0

That is a zero after the “ppp”, it should show you the IP address your device was assigned by the DHCP server at your connection providers end. It should show some IP other than “127.0.0.1” or “192.168.x.x”. If it does not, repeat the “cdma.sh” command and check

2. Make sure you have EC156 modem and it is supported by your tablet.

3. Do not put in any microSD card in the CDMA / EVDO dongle.