Chile Forum

As of this month (believe that is correct), Chile has a law (possibly the first in the world), that all cell phones and sim chips must be sold unlocked. They are also suppose to publish guides for unlocking previously locked phones and sims. So now you can sell your phones, and also take your cell phone numbers with you to a new carrier. The phone number is yours.

How that will work in practice, not so sure. I have not had time to look in to the gory technical details. Which would be kind of nice considering I have a pile of fully paid for blackberries, iphones, and others I would not mind unloading in the classified section of the forum.

If I give them to my employees, I end up just having to pay the phone bill. so better sell them while I can. Although I did give my secretary an iphone with an unlimited data plan for Christmas. She was happier with that than the regular christmas bonus, and I see her working away in my server logs from her iphone at 10 or 11 at night. Surprising sometimes what sorts of things increase productivity among Chilean employees.

So I assume that means that wireless carriers in Chile won't be selling subsidized devices when the new law kicks in, correct? It's hard to justify a subsidy on the phone or USB modem when you can't lock in the customer for the life of the contract.

I have an entel USB modem and have gotten pretty far toward using it with my Ubuntu laptop, thanks to the great suggestions at the top to use the sakis3g script. And, I found that the "FULL INTERNET" codes listed by Admin for Entel seemed to work just fine. So, here I am. The modem is detected and everything looks good, with one little exception. I can't access the internet either through Chrome or via ping.

I ran various info and report actors and got what look like reasonable results.

But, I can't get out. It must be some one more little step that I have overlooked.

Any suggestions?

I am in Frutillar this lovely and windy evening watching lovely clouds scudding south across Volcan Orsono. What could be better.

Val Veirs

Here are the reports I am getting from sakis3g


sakis3g status
E173 connected to entel (73001).

sakis3g report
Please report following text:

Sakis3G version: 0.2.0e
Using embedded Usb-ModeSwitch version:
* Version 1.1.3 (C) Josua Dietze 2010
Kernel version: 2.6.32-122-rtai
Architect: i686
Selected UI is: zenity
Interface: P-t-P (ppp0)
Network ID: 73001
Operator name: entel
APN: imovil.entelpcs.cl
Modem: E173
Modem type: USB
Kernel driver: option
Device: /dev/ttyUSB0
Variables: --interactive APN="CUSTOM_APN" USBDRIVER="option" MODEM="12d1:1446 12d1:140c" DISPLAY=":0" LOCALAUTHORITY="/var/run/gdm/auth-for-val-WRySMW/database"

sakis3g info
Connection Information

Interface: P-t-P (ppp0)

Connected since: 2012-01-27 16:47
Kilobytes received: 7
Kilobytes sent: 8

Network ID: 73001
Operator name: entel
APN: imovil.entelpcs.cl

Modem: E173
Modem type: USB
Kernel driver: option
Device: /dev/ttyUSB0

IP Address: 186.10.246.100
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.255
Peer IP Address: 10.64.64.64
Default route(s): 10.64.64.64

leslieval wrote:

I am in Frutillar this lovely and windy evening watching lovely clouds scudding south across Volcan Orsono.

Nothing to do with modems and everything to do with appreciation for someone who can write about scudding clouds.

Well the scudding clouds finally gave way and a bit of clarity solved my Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) usb wireless dongle problem. I found the solution halfway down this page (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1475597) where there is a description of how to create a .rules file for the USB device. I know, it sounds and it is arcane, but without rules, where would we be.

Good luck to anyone else who ventures here!