At the Professional Developer Conference 2009 (PDC09), all attendees were given an Acer laptop that had been specially built for Microsoft. It has Windows7, 64 bit dual core proc, 250GB hard drive, wireless, bluetooth and 3G. Now it seemed to me that a good percentage of attendees were also carrying around an iPhone – hard to say how many but if I had to guess I would say at least 30%. So obviously there will be many attempts to insert said iPhone SIM into said laptop in hopes of browsing the inter web.
When the PDC ended I flew into Vegas for the Las Vegas Trader’s Expo, and have since had some time in the hotel room to get this scenario working. The key piece of information seems to be the DNS server IP address settings. The successful approach I have found is as follows:
Download and install the HUAWEI 3G driver from the Acer website, also useful is the Acer 3G connection manager software which you will find in the same download area.
Insert iPhone SIM into laptop (socket is underneath the battery)
In Windows 7, open up the wireless connection list (where you normally see a list of SSIDs available for connection). You should see a new group called ‘Mobile broadband connection’ with a single entry called ‘AT&T’.
Right-click on the AT&T entry and choose the profile tab. The setting that appears to be important here is the Access Point Name (APN). I have: wap.cingular
For the username and password entries, I found that it doesn’t matter what you use. Web searches will tell you that combinations of WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM and password CINGULAR1 are good, but i found that also ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ work just as well.
Next, set up the IP settings, go to
Control PanelNetwork and InternetNetwork Connections
right-click->properties->IPv4->obtain an ip address automatically (no need to set the DNS settings at this point as they appear to be overwritten with 0.0.0.0 when you make the connection)
Now right click the connection and select connect/disconnect, this brings up the popup dialog with the AT&T entry. Click this and click ‘connect’.
Once the connection has been made, go back to the IPv4 properties and manually enter a DNS and alternate DNS IP address (use your favorite one).
Click OK and voila, the internet connection should come to life.
Every time you disconnect/reconnect you need to manually change the DNS settings, which is a pain and hopefully someone will let me know a better way.
Hope this helps.